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ALFRED THE GREAT.—VoOIl. i. Face Title. 


HISTORY 


THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 


BY 


JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A. 


Voitume I. 
EARLY ENGLAND, - . - 449-1071 
ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS, 1071-1214 
THE CHARTER, - - - - 1204-1291 
THE PARLIAMENT, - - - 1807-1461 


CHICAGO AND NEW YORK: 


BELFORD, CLARKE & CO. 
1884, 


DONOHUE & HENNEBERRY, 


PRINTED AND BOUND BY _ 
CHICAGO. 


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I DEDICATE THIS BOOK 
TO TWO DEAR FRIENDS, 
MY MASTERS IN THE STUDY OF ENGLISH HISTORY, 
EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN, 


AND 


WILLIAM STUBBS. 


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CONTENTS. 


BOOK I. 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 
CHAPTER I. 


PAGE. 
THE ENGLISH CONQUEST OF BRITAIN. 449—577 ° ° ° f' 


CHAPTER II. 


THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 577—796 : x ° ° “ vi | 


CHAPTER III. 


WESSEX AND THE NORTHMEN. 796—947 . ° ° ° . 67 


- CHAPTER IV. 


FEUDALISM AND THE MONARCHY. 954—1071 . as . . 83 


BOOK II. 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 


CHAPTER I. 

THE CONQUEROR. 1071—1085 . - ‘ A e ° 117 
CHAPTER II. 

THE NORMAN KINGS. 1085—1154 é : . e ° e 128 


CHAPTER IIL. 


HENRY THE SECOND. 1154—1189 ; a ‘ ° e ° 153 


CHAPTER IY. 
THE ANGEVIN KINGS. 1189—1204 . ; : F 173 


Vili * CONTENTS. 


BOOK III. 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 


CHAPTER I 
JOHN. 1214—1216 . ” . r) ° ° e 


CHAPTER II. 

HENRY THE THIRD. 1216—1232 : ‘ 4 ° 
CHAPTER III. 

THE BARONS’ WAR. 1232—1272. ; j 7 ° 


CHAPTER IV. 


EDWARD THE FIRST. 1272—1307 . ; F * 


BOOK IV. 
THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 


CHAPTER I. 


EDWARD THE SECOND. 1307—1327 


e e e 


CHAPTER II, 


EDWARD THE THIRD, 1327—1347 


e e € 


CHAPTER III. — 
THE PEASANT REVCLT. 1347—1381. : : ‘ 


CHAPTER LY. 


RICHARD THE SECOND, 1381—1400 


CHAPTER VY. 


THE HOUSE OF LANCASTER, 1399—1422 . ‘ 


CHAPTER VI. 


THE WARS OF THE ROSES, 1422—1461  , 


514 


3 


BOOK I. 
EARLY ENGLAND 
449-1071, 


AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK I. 
(449—1071.) 


For the conquest of Britain by the English our authorities are 
scant and imperfect. The only extant British account is the ‘‘ Epis- | 
tola” of Gildas, a work written probably about a.p. 560. The style of 
Gildas is diffuse and inflated, but his book is of great value in the light 
it throws on the state of the island at that time, and as giving at its 
close what is probably the native story of the conquest of Kent. This 
is the only part of the struggle of which we have any record from the 
side of the conquered. The English conquerors, on the other hand, 
have left jottings of their conquest of Kent, Sussex, and Wessex in the 
curious annals which form the opening of the compilation now known 
as the ‘‘ English”? or ‘‘ Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,’ annals which are un- 
doubtedly historic, though with a slight mythical intermixture. For 
the history of the English conquest of Mid-Britain or the Eastern Coast 
we possess no written materials from either side ; and a fragment of 
the Annals of Northumbria embodied in the later compilation (‘‘ His- 
toria Britonum’’) which bears the name of Nennius alone throws light 
on the conquest of the North. 

From these inadequate materials however Dr. Guest has succeeded 
by a wonderful combination of historical and archeological knowledge 
in constructing a narrative of the conquest of Southern and South- 
Western Britain, which must serve as the starting-point for all future 
enquirers. This narrative, so far as it goes, has served as the basis of 
the account given in my text ; and I can only trust that it may soon 
be embodied in some more accessible form than that of a series of 
papers in the Transactions of the Archeological Institute. In a like 
way, though Kemble’s ‘‘Saxons in England” and Sir F. Palgrave’s 
‘* History of the English Commonwealth ”’ (if read with caution) contain 
much that is worth notice, our knowledge of the primitive constitution 
of the English people and the changes introduced into it since their 
settlement in Britain must be mainly drawn from the ‘‘ Constitutional 
History’’ of Professor Stubbs. In my earlier book I had not the ad- 
vantage of aid from this invaluable work, which was then unpublished ; 
in the present I do little more than follow it in all constitutional ques- 
tions as far as it has at present gone. 

Beda’s ‘‘ Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum,’’ a work of which 
I have spoken in my text, is the primary authority for the history of 
the Northumbrian overlordship which followed the Conquest. It is 
by copious insertions from Beda that the meagre regnal and episcopal 
annals of the West Saxons have been brought to the shape - which 

( 


4. HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


they at present appear in the part of the English Chronicle which con- 
cerns this period. The life of Wilfrid by Eddi, with those of Cuthbert 
by an anonymous contemporary and by Beda himself, throw great light 
on the religious and intellectual condition of the North at the time of 
its supremacy. But with the fall of Northumbria we pass into a period 
of historical dearth. A few incidents of Mercian history are preserved 
among the meagre annals of Wessex in the English Chronicle: but 
for the most part we are thrown upon later writers, especially Henry 
of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury, who, though authors of 
the twelfth century, had access to older materials which are now lost. 
A little may be gleaned from biographies such as that of Guthlac of 
Crowland ; but the letters of Boniface and Alewine, which have been 
edited by Jaffé in his series of ‘‘ Monumenta Germanica,’’ form the 
most valuable contemporary materials for this period. 

From the rise of Wessex our history rests mainly on the English 
Chronicle. The earlier part of this work, as we have said, is a com- 
pilation, and consists of (1) Annals of the Conquest of South Britain, 
and (2) Short Notices of the Kings and Bishops of Wessex expanded 
by copious insertions from Beda, and after the end of his work by brief 
additions from some northern sources. ‘These materials may have 
been thrown together into their present form in Alfred’s time as a 
preface to the far fuller annals which begin with the reign of Aithel- 
wulf, and which widen into a great contemporary history when they 
reach that of Alfred himself. After Atlfred’s day the Chronicle varies 
much in value. Through the reign of Eadward the Elder it is copious, 
anda Mercian Chronicle is imbedded in it : it then dies down into a 
series of scant and jejune entries, broken however with grand battle- 
songs, till the reign of Aithelred when its fulness returns. 

Outside the Chronicle we encounter a great and valuable mass of 
historical material for the age of Alfred and his successors. The life 
of Alfred which bears the name of Asser, puzzling as it is in some 
ways, is probably really Asser’s work, and certainly of contemporary 
authority. The Latin rendering of the English Chronicle which bears 
the name of thelweard adds a little to our knowledge of this time. 
The Laws, which form the base of our constitutional knowledge of 
this period, fall, as has been well pointed out by Mr. Freeman, into 
two classes. Those of Eadward, Atthelstan, Eadmund, and Eadgar, 
are like the earlier laws of Athelberht and Ine, ‘‘ mainly of the nature 
of amendments of custom.’’ Those of Alfred, Athelred, Cnut, with 
those which bear the name of Eadward the Confessor, ‘‘ aspire to the 
character of Codes.” They are printed in Mr. Thorpe’s ** Ancient 
Laws and Institutes of England,’’ but the extracts given by Professor 
Stubbs in his ‘‘ Select Charters ’’ contain all that directly bears on our 
constitutional growth. A vast mass of Charters and other documents 
belonging to this period has been collected by Kemble in his ‘* Codex 
Diplomaticus Aivi Saxonici,’’ and some are added by Mr. Thorpe in 
his ‘‘ Diplomatarium Anglo-Saxonicum.’’ Dunstan’s biographies have 
been collected and edited by Professor Stubbs in the series published 
by the Master of the Rolls. 

In the period which follows the accession of Athelred we are still 
aided by these collections of royal Laws and Charters, and the English 
Chronicle becomes of great importance. Its various copies indeed 
differ so much in tone and information from one another that they 
may to some extent be looked upon as distinct works, and ‘‘ Florence of 
Worcester’’ is probably the translation of a valuable copy of the 


AUTHORITIES. 5 


**Chronicle’’ which has disappeared. The translation however was 
made in the twelfth century, and it is colored by the revival of national 
feeling which was characteristic of the time. Of Eadward the Con- 
fessor himself we have a contemporary biography (edited by Mr. Luard 
for the Master of the Rolls) which throws great light on the personal 
history of the King and on his relations to the house of Godwine. 

The earlier Norman traditions are preserved by Dudo of St. Quen- 
tin, a verbose and confused writer, whose work was abridged and con- 
tinued by William of Jumieges, a contemporary of the Conqueror. 
William’s work in turn served as the basis of the ‘Roman de Rou” 
composed by Wace in the time of Henry the Second. The primary 
authority for the Conqueror himself is the “‘ Gesta Williemi” of his 
chaplain and violent partizan, William of Poitiers. For the period of 
the invasion, in which the English authorities are meagre, we have 
besides these the contemporary ‘‘ Carmen de Bello Hastingensi,’’ by 
Guy, Bishop of Amiens, and the pictures in the Bayeux Tapestry. 
Orderic, a writer of the twelfth century, gossipy and confused but 
honest and well-informed, tells us much of the religious movement in 
Normandy, and is particularly valuable and detailed in his account of 
the period after the battle of Senlac. Among secondary authorities 
for the Norman Conquest, Simeon of Durham is useful for northern 
matters, and William of Malmesbury worthy of note for his remark- 
able combination of Norman and English feeling. Domesday Book is 
of course invaluable for the Norman settlement. The chief documents 
for the early history of Anjou have been collected in the “ Chroniques 
d’ Anjou”’ published by the Historical Society of France. Those which 
are authentic are little more than a few scant annals of religious 
houses ; but light is thrown on them by the contemporary French 
chronicles. The ‘‘ Gesta Comitum”’ is nothing but a compilation of 
the twelfth century, in which a mass of Angevin romance as to the 
early story of the Counts is dressed into historical shape by copious 
quotations from these French historians. 

It is possible that fresh light may be thrown on our earlier history 
when historical criticism has done more than has yet been done for 
the materiais given us by Ireland and Wales. For Welsh history the 
** Brut-y-Tywysogion”’ and the ‘‘ Annales Cambrie’’ are now acces- 
sible in the series published by the Master of the Rol's : the ‘‘ Chronicle 
of Caradoc of Lancarvan” is translated by Powel *the Mabinogion, 
or Romantic Tales, have been published by Lady Charlotte Guest ; 
and the Welsh Laws collected by the Record Commission. The im- 
portance of these, as embodying a customary code of very early date, 
will probably be better appreciated when we possess the whole of the 
Brehon Laws, the customary laws of Ireland, which are now being 
issued by the Irish Laws Commission, and to which attention has justly 
been drawn by Sir Henry Maine (‘‘ Early History of Institutions’’) as 
preserving Aryan usages of the remotest antiquity. 

The enormous mass of materials which exists ‘for the early history 
of Ireland, various as they are in critical value, may be seen in Mr. 
O’Curry’s ‘‘ Lectures on the Materials of Ancient Irish History ;’”’ and 
they may be conveniently-studied by the general reader in the ‘‘ Annals 
of the Four Masters,’ edited by Dr. O’Donovan. But this is a mere 
compilation (though generally a faithful one) made about the middle 
of the seventeenth century from earlier sources, two of which have 
been published in the Rolls series. One, the ‘‘ Wars of the Gaedhil 
with the Gaill,”’ is an account of the Danish wars which may have 


6 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


been written in the eleventh century ; the other, the ‘‘ Annals of Loch 
Cé,”’ is a chronicle of Irish affairs from the end of the Danish wars to 
1590. The ‘‘ Chronicon Scotorum”’ (in the same series) extends to the 
year 1150, and though composed in the seventeenth century is valuable 
from the learning of its author, Duald Mac-Firbis. The works of Col- 
gan are to Irish church affairs what the ‘‘ Annals of the Four Masters”’ 
are to Irish civil history. ‘They contain a vast collection of translations 
and transcriptions of early saints’ lives, from those of Patrick down- 
wards. Adamnan’s ‘“‘ Life of Columba” (admirably edited by Dr. 
Reeves) supplies some details to the story of the Northumbrian king- 
dom. Among more miscellaneous works we find the ‘‘ Book of Rights,”’ 
a summary of the dues and rights of the several over-kings and under- 
kings, of much earlier date probably than the Norman invasion ; and 
Cormac’s ‘‘ Glossary,’’ attributed to the tenth century and certainly an 
early work, from which much may be gleaned of legal and social de- 
tails, and something of the pagan religion of Ireland. 


CHAPTER I. 
THE ENGLISH CONQUEST OF BRITAIN. 
449—STT. 


For the fatherland of the English race we must look 
far away from England itself. In the fifth century after 
the birth of Christ the one country which we know to 
have borne the name of Angeln or England lay within 
the district which is now called Sleswick, a district in 
the heart of the peninsula that parts the Baltic from the 
northern seas. Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered 
homesteads, its prim little townships looking down on 
inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of 
heather and sand, girt along the coast with a sunless 
woodland broken here and there by meadows that crept 
down to the marshes and the sea. The dwellers in this 
district however seem to have been merely an outlying 
fragment of what was called the Engle or English folk, 
the bulk of whom lay probably in what is now Lower 
Hanover and Oldenburg. On one side of them the 
Saxons of Westphalia held the land from the Weser to 
the Rhine; on the other the Eastphalian Saxons stretched 
away to the Elbe. North again of the fragment of the 
English folk in Sleswick lay another kindred tribe, the 
Jutes, whose name is still preserved in their district 
of Jutland. Engle, Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the 
same Low-German branch of the Teutonic family ; and 
at the momen’ when history discovers thera they were 
being drawn together by the ties of a common blood, 
common speech, common social and political institu- 
tions, There is little ground indeed for believing that 


8 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the three tribes looked on themselves as one people, or 
that we can as yet apply to them, save by anticipation, 
the common name of Englishmen. But each of them 
was destined to share in the conquest of the land in 
which we live; and it is from the union of all of them 
when its conquest was complete that the English people 
has sprung. 

Of the temper and life of the folk in this older Eng- 
Jand we know little. But from the glimpses that we 
catch of it when conquest had brought them to the 
shores of Britain their political and social organization 
must have been that of the German race to which they 
belonged. In their villages lay ready formed the social 
and political life which is round us in the England of to- 
day. A belt of forest or waste parted each from its fel- 
low villages, and within this boundary or mark the 
“township,” as the village was then called from the 
“tun” or rough fence and trench that served as its 
simple fortification, formed a complete and independent 
body, though linked by ties which were strengthening 
every day to the townships about it and the tribe of 
which it formed a part. Its social centre was the home- 
stead where the etheling or eorl, a descendant of the 
first English settlers in the waste, still handed down the 
blood and traditions of his fathers. Around this home- 
stead or ethel, each in its little croft, stood the lowlier 
dwellings of freelings or ceorls, men sprung, it may be, 
from descendants of the earliest settler who had in vari- 
ous ways forfeited their claim to a share in the original 
~ homestead, or more probably from incomers into the vil- 
lage who had since settled round it and been admitted . 
to a share in the land and freedom of the community. 
The eorl was distinguished from his fellow villagers by 
his wealth and his nobler blood; he was held by them 
in an hereditary reverence; and it was from him and his 
fellow zthelings that host-leaders, whether of the village 
or the tribe, were chosen in times of war. But this. 
claim to precedence rested simply on the free recogni- 
tion of his fellow villagers. Within the township every 
freeman or ceorl was equal. It was the freeman whe 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 5 


was the base of village society. He was the “ free- 
necked man” whose long hair floated over a neck which 
had never bowed to a lord. He was the “ weaponed 
man” who alone~bore spear and sword, and who alone 
preserved that right of self-redress or private war which 
in such a state of society formed the main check upon 
lawless outrage. 

Among the English, as among all the races of man- 
kind, justice had originally sprung from each man’s 
personal action. ‘There had been a time when every 
freeman was his own avenger. But even in the earliest 
forms of English society of which we find traces this 
right of self-defence was being modified and restricted 
by a growing sense of public justice. The “blood-wite” 
or compensation in money for personal wrong was the 
first effort of the tribe as a whole to regulate private 
revenge. The freeman’s life and the freeman’s limb had 
each on this system its legal price. ‘“ Eye for eye,” ran 
the rough code, and “ life for life,” or for each fair dam- 
ages. We see a further step towards the modern recog- 
nition of a wrong as done not to the individual man but 
to the people at large in another custom of early date. 
The price of life or limb was paid, not by the wrong- 
doer to the man he wronged, but by the family or house 
of the wrong-doer to the family or house of the wronged. 
Order and law were thus made to rest in each little 
group of people upon the blood-bond which knit its fam- 
ilies together ; every outrage was held to have been done 
by all who were linked in blood to the doer of it, every 
crime to have been done against all who were linked in 
blood to the sufferer from it. From this sense of the 
value of the family bond as a means of restraining the 
wrong-doer by forces which the tribe as a whole did not 
as yet possess sprang the first rude forms of English jus- 
tice. Each kinsman was his kinsman’s keeper, bound to 
protect him from wrong, to hinder him from wrong- 
doing, and to suffer with him and pay for him if wrong 
were done. So fully was this principle recognized that 
even if any man was charged before his fellow-tribesmen 
with crime his. kinsfolk still remained in fact his sole 


10 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


judges; for it was by their solemn oath of his innocence 
or his guilt that he had to stand or fall. 

As the blood-bond gave its first form to English jus- 
tice, so it gave their first forms to English society and 
English warfare. Kinsmen fought side by side in the 
hour of battle, and the feelings of honor and discipline 
which held the host together were drawn from the com- 
mon duty of every man in each little group of warriors 
to his house. And as they fought side by side on the 
field, so they dwelled side by side on the soil. Harling 
abode by Harling, and Billing by Billing; and each 
“wick” or “ham” or “stead” or “tun” took its name 
from the kinsmen who dwelled together init. In this 
way the home or “ ham” of the Billings was Billingham, 
and the “ tun” or township of the Harlings was Harling- 
ton. But in such settlements the tie of blood was 
widened into the larger tie of land. Land with the Ger- 
man race seems at a very early time to have become 
everywhere the accompaniment of full freedom. The 
freeman was strictly the free-holder, and the exercise of 
his full rights as a free member of the community to 
which he belonged became inseparable from the posses- 
sion of his “holding” init. But property had not as 
yet reached that stage of absolutely personal possession 
which the social philosophy of a later time falsely re- 
garded as its earliest state. The woodland and pasture- 
land of an English village were still undivided, and every 
free villager had the right of turning into it his cattle or 
swine. The meadow-land lay in like manner open and 
undivided from hay-harvest to spring. It was only when 
grass began to grow afresh that the common meadow 
was fenced off into grass-fields, one for each household 
in the village; and when hay-harvest was over fence 
and division were at an end again. The plough-land 
alone was permanently allotted in equal shares both of 
corn-land and fallow-land to the families of the freemen, 
though even the plough-land was subject to fresh division 
as the number of claimants grew greater or less. 

It was this sharing in the common land which marked 
off the freeman or ceorl from the unfree man or let, the 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—-1071. 11 


tiller of land which another owned. As the ceorl was 
the descendant of settlers who whether from their earlier 
arrival or from kinship with the original settlers of the 
village had been admitted to a share in its land and its 
corporate life, so the let was a descendant of later 
comers to whom such a share was denied, or in some cases 
perhaps of earlier dwellers from whom the land had been 
wrested by force of arms. In the modern sense of freedom 
the let was free enough. He had house and home of his 
own, his life and limb were as secure as the ceorl’s—save 
as against his lord; it is probable from what we see in 
later laws that as time went on he was recognized among 
the three tribes as a member of the nation, summoned 
to the folk-moot, allowed equal right at law, and called 
like the full free man to the hosting. But he was unfree 
as regards lord and land. He had neither part nor lot in 
the common land of the village. The ground which he 
tilled he held of some free man of the tribe to whom he 
paid rent in labor or in kind. And this man was his 
lord. Whatever rights the unfree villager might gain in 
the general social life of his fellow villagers, he had no 
rights as against his lord. He could leave neither land nor 
lord at his will. He was bound to render due service to 
his lord in tillage or in fight. So long however as these 
services were done the land was his own. His lord could 
not take it from him; and he was bound to give him aid » 
and protection in exchange for his services. 

Far different from the position of the let was that of 
the slave, though there is no ground for believing that the 
slave class was other than a small one. It was a class 
which sprang mainly from debt or crime. Famine drove 
men to “ bend their heads in the evil days for meat;” the 
debtor, unable to discharge his debt, flung on the ground 
his freeman’s sword and spear, took up the laboret’s 
mattock, and placed his head as a slave within a master’s 
hands. The criminal whose kinsfolk would not make up 
his fine became a crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king. 
Sometimes a father pressed by need sold children and wife 
into bondage. In any case the slave became part of the 
live stock of his master’s estate, to be willed away at death 


12 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


with horse or ox, whose pedigree was kept as carefully as 
his own. His children were bondsmen like himself; evena 
freeman’s children by a slave mother inherited the mother’s 
taint. ‘ Mine is the calf that is born of my cow,” ran an 
English proverb. Slave cabins clustered round the home- 
stead of every rich landowner; ploughman, shepherd, 
goatherd, swineherd, oxherd and cowherd, dairymaid, 
barnman, sower, hayward and woodward, were often slaves. 
It was not indeed slavery such as we have known in 
modern times, for stripes and bonds were rare: if the 
slave was slain it was by an angry blow, not by the lash. 
But his master could slay him if he would; it was but 
a chattel the less. The slave had no place in the justice 
court, no kinsman to claim vengeance or guilt-fine for 
his wrong. If a stranger slew him his lord claimed the 
damages; if guilty of wrong-doing, “his skin paid for 
him” under his master’s lash. If he fled he might be 
chased like a strayed beast, and. when caught he might 
be flogged to death. If the wrong-doer were a woman- 
slave she might be burned, 

With. the public life of the village however the slave 
had nothing, the let in early days little, to do. In its 
_ Moot, the common meeting of its villagers for justice and 
government, a slave had no place or voice, while the let 
was originally represented by the lord whose land he 
tilled. The life, the sovereignty of the settlement resided 
solely in the body of the freemen whose holdings lay round 
the moot-hill or the sacred tree where the community met 
from time to time to deal out its own justice and to make 
its own laws. Here new settlers were admitted to the 
- freedom of the township, and bye-laws framed and head- 
man and tithing-man chosen for its governance. Here 
plough-land and meadow-land were shared in due lot 
among the villagers, and field and homestead passed from 
man to man by the delivery of a turf cut from its soil. 
Here strife of farmer with farmer was settled according to 
the “‘ customs ” of the township as its elder men stated 
them, nd four men were chosen to follow headman or 
ealdorman to hundred-court or war. It is with a rev- 
erence such as is stirred by the sight of the head-waters 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071 13 


of some mighty river that one looks back to these village- 
moots of Friesland or Sleswick. It was here that Eng- 
land learned to be a “mother of Parliaments.” It was 
in these tiny knots of farmers that the men from whom 
Englishmen were to spring learned the worth of public 
opinion, of public discussion, the worth of the agreement, 
the ‘common. sense,” the general conviction to which 
discussion leads, as of the laws which derive their force 
from being expressions of that general conviction. A 
humorist of our own day has laughed at Parliaments as 
«talking shops,” and the laugh has been echoed by some 
who have taken humor for argument. But talk is per- 
suasion, and persuasion is force, the one force which can 
sway freemen to deeds such as those which have made 
England what she is. The “talk” of the village moot, 
the strife and judgment of men giving freely their own 
rede and setting it as freely aside for what they learn 
to be the wiser rede of other men, is the ground work 
of English history. 

Small therefore as it might be, the township or village 
was thus the primary and perfect type of English life, 
domestic, social, and political. All that England has been 
since lay there. But changes of which we know nothing 
had long before the time at which our history opens 
grouped these little commonwealths together in larger 
communities, whether we name them Tribe, People, or 
Folk. The ties of race and kindred were no doubt drawn 
tighter by the needs of war. The organization of each 
Folk, as such, sprang in all likelihood mainly from war, 
from a common greed of conquest, a common need of 
defence. Its form at any rate was wholly military. The 
Folk-moot was in fact the war-host, the gathering of 
every freeman of the tribe in arms. The head of the 
Folk, a head who existed only so long as war went on, 
was the leader whom the host chose to command it. Its 
Witenagemote or meeting of wise men was the host’s 
council of war, the gathering of those ealdormen who had 
brought the men of their villages to the field. The host 
was formed by levies from the various districts of the 
tribe; the larger of which probably owed their name of 


14 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


“ hundreds” to the hundred warriors which each origin- 
ally sent to it. In historic times however the regularity 
of such a military organization, if it ever existed, had 
passed away, and the quotas varied with the varying 
customs of each district. But men, whether many or few, 
were still due from each district to the host, and a ery of 
war at once called town-reeve and hundred-reeve with 
their followers to the field. 

The military organization of the tribe thus gave from 
the first its form to the civil organization. But the pecu- 
liar shape which its civil organization assumed was de- 
termined by a principle familiar to the Germanic races 
and destined to exercise a vast influence on the future 
of mankind. This was the principle of representation. 
The four or ten villagers who followed the reeve of each 
township to the general muster of the hundred were held 
to represent the whole body of the township from whence 
they came. ‘Their voice was its voice, their doing its 
doing, their pledge its pledge. The hundred-moot, a 
moot which was made by this gathering of the represen- 
tatives of the townships that lay within its bounds, thus 
became at once a court of appeal from the moots of each 
separate village as well as of arbitration in dispute be- 
tween township and township. The judgment of graver 
crimes and of life or death fell to its share; while it ne- 
cessarily possessed the same right of law-making for the 
hundred that the village-moot possessed for each separate 
village. And as hundred-uoot stood above town-moot, 
so above the hundred-moot stood the Folk-moot, the 
general muster of the people in arms, at once war-host 
and highest law-court and general Parliament of the 
tribe. But whether in Folk-moot or hundred-moot, the 
principle of representation’ was preserved. In both the 
constitutional forms, the forms of deliberation and deci- 
sion, were the same. In each the priests proclaimed 
silence, the ealdormen of higher blood spoke, groups of 
freemen from each township stood round, shaking their 
spears in assent, clashing shields in applause, settling 
matters in the end by loud shouts of “ Aye” or “ Nay.” 

Of the social or the industrial life of our fathers in this 


EARLY ENGLAND, 449—1071. 13 


older England we know less than of their political life. 
But there is no ground for believing them to have been 
very different in these respects from the other German 
peoples who were soon to overwhelm the Roman world. 
Though their border nowhere touched the border of the 
Empire they were far from being utterly strange to its. 
civilization. Roman commerce indeed reached the shores 
of the Baltic, and we have abundant evidence that the 
arts and refinement of Rome were brought into contact 
with these earlier Englishmen. Brooches, sword-belts, 
and shield-bosses which have been found in Sleswick, 
and which can be dated not later than the close of the 
third century, are clearly either of Roman make or 
closely modelled on Roman metal-work. The vessels of 
twisted glass which we know to have been in use at the 
tables of English and Saxon chieftains came, we can 
hardly doubt, from Roman glass-works. Discoveries of 
Roman coins in Sleswick peat-mosses afford a yet more 
conclusive proof of direct intercourse with the Empire. 
But apart from these outer influences the men of the 
three tribes were far from being mere savages. They 
were fierce warriors, but they were also busy fishers 
and tillers of the soil, as proud of their skill in hand- 
ling plough and mattock or steering the rude boat with 
which they hunted walrus and whale as of their skill 
in handling sword and spear. They were hard drinkers, 
no doubt, as they were hard toilers, and the “ ale-feast ” 
was the centre of their social life. But coarse as the 
revel might seem to modern eyes, the scene within the 
timbered hall which rose in the midst of their village was 
often Homeric in its simplicity and dignity. Queen or 
Eorl’s wife with a train of maidens bore ale-bowl or 
mead-bowl round the hall frém the high settle of King 
or Ealdorman in the midst to the mead benches ranged 
around its walls, while the gleeman sang the hero-songs 
of his race. Dress and arms showed traces of a love of 
art and beauty, none the less real that it was rude and 
incomplete. Rings, amulets, ear-rings, neck pendants, 
proved in their workmanship the deftness of the gold- 
smith’s art. Cloaks were often fastened with golden 


16 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


buckles of curious and exquisite form, set sometimes 
with rough jewels and inlaid with enamel. The bronze 
boar-crest on the warrior’s helmet, the intricate adorn- 
ment of the warrior’s shield, tell like the honourin which 
the smith was held their tale of industrial art. It is only 
in the English pottery, handmade, and marked with 
coarse zig-zag patterns, that we find traces of utter rude- 
ness. 

The religion of these men was theyame as that of the 
rest of the German peoples. Christianity had by this 
time brought about the conversion of the Roman Empire, 
but it had not penetrated as yet among the forests of the 
north. The common God of the English people was 
Woden, the war-god, the guardian of ways and bound- 
aries, to whom his worshippers attributed the invention 
of letters, and whom every tribe held to be the first 
ancestor of its kings. Our own names for the days of 
the week still recall to us the gods whom our fathers 
worshipped in their German homeland. Wednesday is 
Woden’s-day, as Thursday is the day of Thunder, the 
god of air and storm and rain. Friday is Frea’s-day, the 
deity of peace and joy and fruitfulness, whose emblems, 
borne aloft by dancing maidens, brought increase to 
every field and stall they visited. Saturday commemo- 
rates an obscure god Setere; Tuesday the dark god, 
Tiw, to meet whom was death. LEostre, the god of the 
dawn or of the spring, lends his name to the Christian 
festival of the Resurrection. Behind these floated the 
dim shapes of an clder mythology ; “ Wyrd,” the death- 
goddess, whose memory lingered long in the “ Weird” 
of northern superstition, or the Shield-maidens, the 
“mighty women” who, an old rime tells us, “ wrought 
on the battle-field their toil and hurled the thrilling 
javelins.” Nearer to the popular fancy lay deities of 
wood and fell or hero-gods of legend and song; Nicor, 
the water-sprite who survives in our nixies and “ Old 
Nick ;’’ Weland, the forger of weighty shields and sharp- 
biting swords, who found a later home in the “ Weyland’s 
smithy” of Berkshire; Egil, the hero-archer, whose 
legend is one with that of Cloudesly or Tell. A nature- 


a 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. Ve 


worship of this sort lent itself ill to the purposes of a 
priesthood; and though a priestly class existed it seems 
at no time to have had much weight among Englishmen. 
As each freeman was his own judge and his own law- 
maker, so he was his own house-priest ; and English 
worship lay commonly in the sacrifice which the house- 
father offered to the gods of his hearth. 

It is not indeed in Woden-worship or in the worship. of 
the older gods of flood and fell that we must look for 
the real religion of our fathers. The song of Beowuif, 
though the earliest of English poems, is as we have it 
now a poem of the eighth century, the work it may be 
of some English missionary of the days of Beda and 
Boniface who gathered in the very homeland of his race 
the legends of its earlier prime. But the thin veil of 
Christianity which he has flung over it fades away as we 
follow the hero legend of our fathers; and the secret of 
their moral temper, of their conception of life breathes 
through every line. Life was built with them not on 
the hope of a hereafter, but on the proud self-conscious- 
ness of noble souls. “I have this folk ruled these fifty 
winters,” sings a hero-king as he sits death-smitten beside 
the dragon’s mound. “Lives there no folk-king of kings 
about me—not any one of them—dare in the war-strife 
welcome my onset! ‘Time’s change and chances I have 
abided, held my own fairly, sought not to snare men; 
oath never sware I falsely against right. So for all this 
may I glad be at heart now, sick though I sit here, 
wounded with death-wounds!” In men of such a 
temper, strong with the strength of manhood and full of 
the vigor and the love of life, the sense of its shortness 
and of the mystery of it all woke chords of a pathetic 
poetry. “Soon will it be,” ran the warning rime, “ that 
sickness or sword-blade shear thy strength from thee, or 
the fire ring thee, or the flood whelm thee, or the sword 
grip thee, or arrow hit thee, or age o’ertake thee, and 
thine eye’s brightness sink down in darkness.” Strong 
as he might be, man struggled in vain with the doom that 
encompassed him, that girded his life with a thousand 
perils and broke it at so shorta span. “To us,” cries 


18 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Beowulf in his last fight, “ to us it shall be as our Weird 
betides, that Weird that is every man’s lord!” But the 
sadness with which these Englishmen fronted the 
mysteries of life and death had nothing in it of the un- 
manly despair which bids men eat and drink for to- 
morrow they die. Death leaves man man and master of 
his fate. The thought of good fame, of manhood, is 
stronger than the thought of doom. ‘ Well shall a man 
do when in the strife he minds but of winning longsome 
renown, nor for his life cares!” “ Death is better than 
life of shame!” cries Beowulf’s sword-fellow. Beowulf 
himself take up his strife with the fiend, “go the weird 
as it will.” If life is short, the more cause to work 
bravely till itisover. ‘Each man of us shall abide the 
end of his lfe-work; let him that may work, work his 
doomed deeds ere death come!” 

The energy of these peoples found vent in a restlessness 
which drove them to take part in the general attack of the 
German race on the Empire of Rome. For busy tillers 
and busy fishers as Englishmen were, they were at heart 
fighters ; and their world wasa world of war. Tribe warred 
with tribe, and village with village; even within the 
township itself feuds parted household from household, 
and passions of hatred and vengeance were handed on from 
father to son. Their mood was above all a mood of fight- 
ing men, venturesome, self-reliant, proud, with a dash of 
hardness and cruelty in it, but ennobled by the virtues 
which spring from war, by personal courage and loyalty to 
plighted word, by a high and stern sense of manhood and 
the worth of man. A grim joy in hard fighting was already 
acharacteristic of the race. War was the Englishman’s 
“ shield-play ” and “sword-game;” the gleeman’s verse 
took fresh fire as he sang of the rush of the host and the 
crash of its shield-line. Their arms and weapons, helmet 
and mailshirt, tall spear and javelin, sword and seax, the 
short broad dagger that hung at each warrior’s girdle, 
gathered to them much of the legend and the art which 
- gave color and poetry to the life of Englishmen. Each 
sword had its name like aliving thing. Andnext to their 
love of war came their love of the sea. Everywhere 


." 


os 


EARLY ENGLAND, 449—1071. 19 


throughout Beowulf’s song, as every where throughout the 
life that it pictures; we catch the salt whiff of the sea. 
The Englishman was as proud of his sea-craft as of his 
war-craft; sword in teeth he plunged into the sea to meet 
walrus and sea-lion; he told of his whale-chase amidst the 
icy waters of the north. Hardly less than his love for the 
sea was the love he bore to the ship that traversedit. In 
the fond playfulness of English verse the ship was “ the 
wave-floater,” “the foam-necked,” “like a bird” as it 
skimmed the wave-crest, “like aswan ” as its curved prow 
breasted the “swan-road ” of the sea. 

Their passion for the sea marked out for them their part 
in the general movement of the German nations. While 
Goth and Lombard were slowly advancing over mountain 
and plain the boats of the Englishmen pushed faster over 
the sea. Bands of English rovers, outdriven by stress of 
fight, had long found a home there, and livedas they could 
by sack of vessel or coast. Chance has preserved for us in 
a Sleswick peat-bog one of the war-keels of these early 
pirates. The boat is flat-bottomed, seventy feet long and 
eight or nine feet wide, its sides of oak boards fastened 
with bark ropes and iron bolts. Fifty oars drove it over 
the waves with a freight of warriors whose arms, axes, 
swords, lances, and knives were found heaped together in 
its hold. Like the galleys of the Middle Ages such boats 
could only creep cautiously along from harbor to harbor 
in rough weather ; but in smooth water their swiftness fitted 
them admirably for the piracy by which the men of these 
tribes were already making themselves dreaded. Its flat 
bottom enabled them to beach the vessel on any fitting 
coast; and a step on shore at once transformed the boat- 
men into a war-band. From the first the daring of the Eng- 
lish race broke out in the secrecy and suddenness of the 
pirates’ swoop, in the fierceness of their onset, in the care- 
less glee with which they seized either sword or oar. 
“Foes are they,” sang a Roman poet of the time, “ fierce 
beyond other foes and cunning as they are fierce; the sea 
is their school of war and the storm their friend; they 
are sea-wolves that prey on the pillage of the world!” 

Of the three English tribes the Saxons lay nearest to 


wer 


a 


20 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the Empire, and they were naturally the first to touch 
the Roman world; before the close of the third century 
indeed their boats appeared in such force in the English 
Channel as to call fora special fleet to resist them. The 
piracy of our fathers had thus brought them to the 
shores of a land which, dear as it is now to English- 
men, had not as yet been trodden by English feet. This 
land was Britain. When the Saxon boats touched its 
coast the island was the westernmost province of the 
Roman Empire. In the fifty-fifth year before Christ a 
descent of Julius Cesar revealed it. to the Roman 
world; and a century after Cesar’s landing the Emperor 
Claudius undertook its conquest. The work was swiftly 
carried out. Before thirty years were over the bulk of 
the island had passed beneath the Roman sway and the 
Roman frontier had been carried to the Firths of Forth 
and. of Clyde. The work of civilization followed fast on 
the work of thesword. To the last indeed the distance of 
the island from the seat of empire left her less Romanized 
than any other province of the west. The bulk of the 
population scattered over the country seem in spite of 
imperial edicts to have clung to their old law as to 
their old language, and to have retained some traditional 
allegiance to their native chiefs. But Roman civilization 
rested mainly on city life, and in Britain as elsewhere 
the city was thoroughly Roman. In towns such as 
Lincoln or York, governed by theirown municipal officers, 
guarded by massive walls, and hnked together by a 
network of magnificent roads which reached from one 
end of the island to the other, manners, language, politi- 
eal life, all were of Rome. 

For three hundred years the Roman sword secured order 
and peace without Britain and within, and with peace and 
order came a wide and rapid prosperity. Commercesprang 
up in ports amongst which London held the first rank ; 
agriculture flourished till Britain became one of the 
corn-exporting countries of the world; the mineral re- 
sources of the province were explored in the tin mines 
of Cornwall, the lead mines of Somerset or Northumber- 
land, and the iron mines of the Forest of Dean. But 


ha 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. pia 


evils which sapped the strength of the whole Empire told 
at last on the province of Britain. Wealth and popu- 
lation alike declined under a crushing system of taxation, 
under restrictions which fettered industry, under a des- 
potism which crushed out all local independence. And 
with decay within came danger from without. For 
centuries past the Roman frontier had held back the 
barbaric world beyond it, the Parthian of the Euphrates, 
the Numidian of the African desert, the German of the 
Danube or the Rhine. In Britain a wall drawn from 
Newcastle to Carlisle bridled the British tribes, the 
Picts as they were called, who had been sheltered from. 
Roman conquest by the fastnesses of the Highlands. It 
was this mass of savage barbarism which broke upon the 
Empire as it sank into decay. In its western dominions 
the triumph of these assailants was complete. The Franks 
conquered and colonized Gaul. The West-Goths con- 
quered and colonized Spain. The Vandals founded a 
kingdom in Africa. The Burgundians encamped in the 
border-land between Italy and the Rhone. The East- 
- Goths ruled at last in Italy itself. 

It was to defend Italy against the Goths that Rome in 
the opening of the fifth century withdrew her legions front 
Britain, and from that moment the province was left to 
struggle unaided against the Picts. Nor were these its only 
enemies. While marauders from Ireland, whose inhabit- 
ants then bore the name of Scots, harried the west, the 
boats of Saxon pirates, as we have seen, were swarming 
off its eastern and southern coasts. For forty years Brit- 
ain held bravely out against these assailants; but civil 
strife broke its powers of resistance, and its rulers fell 
back at last on the fatal policy by which the Empire in- 
vited its doom while striving to avert it, the policy of 
matching barbarian against barbarian. By the usual 
promises of land and pay a band of warriors was drawn 
for this purpose from Jutland in 449 with two ealdormen, 
Hengest and Horsa, at their head. If by English history 
we mean the history of Englishmen in the land which from 
that time they made their own, it is with this landing of 
Hengest’s war-band that English history begins. They 


i HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


2) 


landed on the shores of the Isle of Thanet at a spot 
known since at Ebbsfleet. No spot can be so sacred to 
Englishmen as the spot which first felt the tread of Eng- 
lish feet. There is little to catch the eye in Ebbsfleet 
itself, a mere lift of ground with afew gray cottages 
dotted over it, cut off nowadays from the sea by a re. 
claimed meadow and a sea-wall. But taken as a whole 
the scene has-a-wild beauty of its own. To the right 
the white curve of Ramsgate cliffs looks down on the 
crescent of Pegwell Bay; far away to the left across gray 
marsh-levels where smoke-wreaths mark the site of Rich- 
borough and Sandwich the coast-line trends dimly to- 
wards Deal. Everything in the character of the spot con- 
firms the national tradition which fixed here the landing 
place of our fathers ; for the physical changes of the coun- 
try since the fifth century have told little on its main fea- 
tures. At the time of Hengest’s landing a broad inlet of 
sea parted Thanet from the mainland of Britain; and 
through this inlet the pirate boats would naturally come 
sailing with a fair wind to what was then the gravel-spit 
of Ebbsfleet. 

The work for which the mercenaries had been hired was 
quickly done ; and the Picts are said to have been scattered 
to the windsin a battle fought on the eastern coast of 
Britain. But danger from the Pict was hardly over when 
danger came from the Jutes themselves. Their fellow- 
pirates must have flocked from the Channel to their settle- 
mentin Thanet; the inlet between Thanet and the main- 
land was crossed, and the Englishmen won their first vic- 
tory over the Britons in forcing their passage of the Med- 
way at the village of Aylesford. A second defeat at the 
passage of the Cray drove the British forces in terror upon 
London; but the ground was soon won back again, and it 
was not till 465 thata series of petty conflicts which had 
gone on along the shores of Thanet made way fora decisive 
struggle at Wippedsfleet. Here however the overthrow 
was so terrible that from this moment all hope of saving 
Northern Kent seems to have been abandoned, and it was 
only on its southern shore that the Britons held their 
ground. Ten years later,in 475, the long contest was over, 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 23 


and with the fall of Lymne, whose broken walls look from 
the slope to which they cling over the great flat of Romney 
Marsh, the work of the first English conqueror was-done. 
The warriors of Hengest had been drawn from the Jutes, 
the smallest of the three tribes who were to blend in the 
English people. But the greed of plunder now told on the 
great tribe which stretched from the Elbe to the Rhine, 
and in 477 Saxon invaders were seen pushing slowly along 
the strip of land which lay westward of Kent between the 
weald and the sea. Nowhere has the physical aspect of 
the country more utterly changed. <A vast sheet of 
scrub, woodland, and waste which then bore the name of 
the Andredsweald stretched for more than a hundred miles ° 
from the borders of Kent to the Hampshire Downs,extend- 
ing northward almost to the Thames and leaving only 
a thin trip of coast which now bears the name of Sussex 
between its southern edge and the sea. This coast was 
guarded by a fortress which occupied the spoi now called 
Pevensey, the future landing-place of the Norman Con- 
queror ; and the fall of this fortress of Anderida in 491 
established the kingdom of the South-Saxons. ‘“ Aille 
and Cissa beset Anderida,” so ran the pitiless record of 
the conquerors, “and slew all that were therein, nor 
was there afterwards one Briton left.” But Hengest and 
7flle’s men had touched hardly more than the coast, 
and the true conquest of Southern Britain was reserved 
for a fresh band of Saxons, a tribe known as the 
Gewissas, who landed under Cerdic and Cynric on the 
shores of the Southampton Water, and pushed in 495 
to the great downs or Gwent where Winchester offered 
so rich a prize. Nowhere was the strife fiercer than 
here; and it was not till 519 that a decisive victory at 
Charford ended the struggle for the “ Gwent” and set 
the crown of the West-Saxons on the head of Cerdic. 
But the forest-belt around it checked any further advance, 
and only a year after Charford the Britons rallied 
under a new leader, Arthur, and threw back the invaders 
as they pressed westward through the Dorsetshire wood- 
lands in + great overthrow at Badbury or Mount Badon. 
The defeat was followed by a long pause in the Saxon 


D4 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


advance from the southern coast, but while the Gewissas 
rested a series of victories whos hi:tory is lost was giving 
to men of the same Saxon trib the coast district north 
of the mouth of the Thames. It is probable however that 
the strength of Camulodunum, thc predecessor of our 
modern Colchester, made the progress of these assailants 
a slow and doubtful one; and even when its reduction 
enabled the East-Saxons to occupy the territory to which 
they have given their name of Essex a line of woodland 
which has left its traces in Epping and Hainault Foresst 
checked their further advance into the island. 

Though seventy years had passed since the victory of 
Aylesford only the outskirts of Britain were won. ‘The 
invaders were masters as yet but of Kent, Sussex, Hamp- 
shire, and Essex. From London to St. David’s Head, from 
the Andredsweald to the Firth of Forth the country still 
remained unconquered: and there was little in the years 
which followed Arthur’s triumph to herald that onset of 
the invaders which was soon to make Britain England. 
Till now its assailants had been drawn from two only of 
the three tribes whom we saw dwelling by the northern 
sea, from the Saxons and the Jutes. But the main work 
of conquest was to be done by the third, by the tribe 
which bore that name of Engle or Englishmen which 
was to absorb that of Saxon or Jute and to stamp itself 
on the people which sprang from the union of the 
conquerors as on the land that they won. The Engle had 
probably been settling for vears along the coast of 
Northumbria and in the great district which was cut off 
from the rest of Britain by the Wash and the Fens, the 
later East-Anglia. But it was not till the moment we - 
have reached that the line of defences which had hitherto 
held the invaders at bay was turned by their appearance 
in the Humber and the Trent. This great river-line led 
like a highway into the heart of Britam ; and civil strife 
seems to have broken the strength of British resistance. 
But of the incidents of this final struggle we know nothing. 
One part of the English force marched from the Humber 
over the Yorkshire wolds to found what was called the 
kingdom of the Deirans. Under the Empire political 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 95 


power had centred in the district between the Humber and 
the Roman wail; York was the capital of Roman Britain ; 
villas of rich landowners studded the valley of the Ouse ; 
and the bulk of the garrison maintained in the island lay 
camped along itsnorthern border. But no record tells us 
how Yorkshire was won, or how the Engle made them- 
selves masters of the uplands about Lincoln. It is only 
by their later settlements that we follow their march into 
the heart of Britain. Seizing the valley of the Don and 
whatever breaks there were in the woodland that then 
filled the space between the Humber and the Trent, the 
Engle followed the curve of the latter river, and struck | 
along the line of its tributary the Soar. Here round the 
Roman Ratz, the predecessor of our Leicester, settled a 
tribe known as the Middle-English, while a small body 
pushed further southwards, and under the name of * South- 
Engle” occupied the oolitic upland that forms our present 
Northamptonshire. But the mass of the invaders seem to 
have held to the line of the Trent and to have pushed 
westward to its head-waters. Repton, Lichfield, and 
Tamworth mark the country of these western Englishmen, 
whose older name was soon lost in that of Mercians, or 
Men of the March. Their settlement was in fact a new 
march or borderland between conqueror and conquered ; 
for here the impenetrable fastness of the Peak, the mass 
of Cannock Chase, and the broken country of Stafford- 
shire enabled the Briton to make a fresh and desperate 
stand. 

It was probably this conquest of Mid-Britain by the 
Engle that roused the West-Saxons to a new advance. 
For thirty years they had rested inactive within the limits 
of the Gwent, but in 552 their capture of the hill-fort of 
Old Sarum threw open the reaches of the Wiltshire downs 
and a march of King Cuthwulf on the Thames made them 
masters in 571 of the districts which now form Oxford- 
shire and Berkshire. Pushing along the upper valley of 
Avon to a new battle at Barbury Hill they swooped at 
last from their uplands on the rich prey that lay along the 
Severn. Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath, cities which 
had leagued under their British kings to resist this onset, 


20 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 


became in 577 the spoil of an English victory at Deorham, 
and the line of the great western river lay open to the 
arms of the conquerors. Once the West-Saxons pene- 
trated to the borders of Chester, and Uriconium, a town 
beside the Wrekin which has been recently brought again 
to light, went up in flames. The raid ended in a crushing 
defeat which broke the West-Saxon strength, but a Brit- 
ish poet in verses still left to us sings piteously the death- 
song of Uriconium, ‘the white town in the valley,” the 
town of white stone gleaming among the green woodlands. 
The torch of the foe had left it a heap of blackened ruins 
where the singer wandered through halls he had known 
in happier days, the halls of its chief Kyndylan, “ with- 
out fire, without light, without song,” their stillness bro- 
ken only by the eagle’s scream, the eagle who “ has swal- 
lowed fresh drink, heart’s blood of Kyndylan the far. 


oe 


CHAPTER II. 
THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 
577-796. 


WITH the victory of Deorham the conquest of the 
bulk of Britain was complete. Eastward of a line which 
may be roughly drawn along the moorlands of Northum- 
berland and Yorkshire through Derbyshire and the For- 
est of Arden to the Lower Severn, and thence by 
Mendip to the sea, the island had passed into English 
hands. Britain had in the main become England. And 
within this new England a Teutonic society was settled 
on the wreck of Rome. So far as the conquest had yet 
gone it had been complete. Not a Briton remained as 
subject or slave on English ground. Sullenly, inch by 
inch, the beaten men drew back from the land which their 
conquerors had won; and eastward of the border line 
which the English sword had drawn all was now purely 
English. 

It is this which distinguishes the conquest of Britain 
from that of the other provinces of Rome. The con- 
quest of Gaul by the Franks or that of Italy by the 
Lombards proved little more than a forcible settlement 
of the one or the other among tributary subjects who 
were destined in a long course of ages to absorb their 
conquerors. French is the tongue, not of the Frank, 
but of the Gaul whom he overcame; and the fair hair of 
the Lombard is all but unknown in Lombardy. But the 
English conquest of Britain up to the point which we 
have reached was a sheer dispossession of the people whom 
the English conquered. It was not that Englishmen, 

(27) 


28 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


fierce and cruel as at times they seem to have been, were 
more fierce or more cruel than other Germans who at- 
tacked the Empire; nor have we any ground for saying 
that they, unlike the Burgundian or the Frank, were 
utterly strange to the Roman civilization. Saxon mer- 
cenaries are found as well as Frank mercenaries in the 
pay of Rome; and the presence of Saxon vessels in the 
Channel for a century before the descent on Britain 
must have familiarized its invaders with what civilization 
was to be found in the Imperial provinces of the West. 
What really made the difference between the fate of 
Britain and that of the rest of the Roman world was the 
stubborn courage of the British themselves. In all the 
world-wide struggle between Rome and the German peo- 
ples no land was so stubbornly fought for or so hardly 
won. In Gaul no native resistance met Frank or Visi- 
goth save from the brave peasants of Britanny and 
Auvergne, No popular revolt broke out against the rule 
of Odoacer or Theodoric in Italy. But in Britain the 
invader was met by a courage almost equal to his own. 
Instead of quartering themselves quietly, like their fel- 
lows abroad, on subjects who were glad to buy peace by 
obedience and tribute, the English had to make every 
inch of Britain their own by hard fighting. 

This stubborn resistance was backed too by natural 
obstacles of the gravest kind. Everywhere in the Roman 
world the work of the conquerors was aided by the ciy- 
ilization of Rome. Vandal or Frank marched along Ro- 
man highways over ground cleared by the Roman axe 
and crossed river or ravine on the Roman bridge. It 
was so doubtless with the English conquerors of Britain. 
But though Britain had long “been Roman, her distance 
from the seat of Empire left her less Romanized than any 
other province of the West. Socially the Roman civili- 
zation had made little impression on any but the towns- 
folk, and the material civilization of the island was yet 
more backward than its social. Its natural defences 
threw obstacles in its invaders’ way. In the forest belts 
which stretched over vast spaces of country they found 
barriers which in all cases checked their advance and in 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 29 


some cases finally stopped it. The Kentishmen and the 
South Saxons were brought utterly to astandstill by the 
Andredsweald. The East Saxons could never pierce the 
woods of their western border. The Fens proved im- 
passable to the Northfolk and the Southfolk of East- 
Anglia. It was only after a long and terrible struggle 
that the West-Saxons could hew their way through the 
forests which sheltered the “Gwent” of the southern 
coast. Their attempt to break out of the circle of wood- 
land which girt in the downs was in fact fruitless for 
thirty years; and in the height of their later power they 
were thrown back from the forests of Cheshire. 

It is only by realizing in this way the physical as well — 
as the moral circumstances of Britain that we can under- 
stand the character of its earlier conquest. Field by 
field, town by town, forest by forest, the land was won. 
And as each bit of ground was torn away by the stranger, 
the Briton sullenly withdrew from it only to turn dog- 
gedly and fight for the next. There is no need to_be- 
lieve that the clearing of the land meant so impossible a 
thing as the general slaughter of the men who held it. 
Slaughter there was, no doubt, on the battle-field or in 
towns like Anderida whose resistance woke wrath in 
their besiegers. But for the most part the Britons were 
not slaughtered; they were defeated and drew back. 
Such a withdrawal was only made possible by the slow- 
ness of the conquest. For it is not only the stoutness of 
its defence which distinguishes the conquest of Britain 
from that of the other provinces of the Empire, but the 
weakness of attack. As the resistance of the Britons 
was greater than that of the other provincials of Rome 
so the forces of their assailants were less. Attack by 
sea was less easy than attack by land, and the numbers 
who were brought across by the boats of Hengest or 
Cerdic cannot have rivalled those which followed Theo- 
doric or Chlodewig across the Alps or the Rhine. Land- 
ing in small parties, and but gradually reinforced by 
after-comers, the English invaders could only slowly and 
fitfully push the Britons back. The absence of any joint 
action among the assailants told in the same way. 


30 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Though all spoke the same language and used the same 
laws, they had no such bond of political union as the 
Franks ; and though all were bent on winning the same 
land, each band and each leader preferred their own sep- 
arate course of action to any collective enterprise. 

Under such conditions the overrunning of Britain 
could not fail to be a very different matter from the 
rapid and easy overrunning of such countries as Gaul. 
How slow the work of English conquest was may be seen 
from the fact that it took nearly thirty years to win Kent 
alone and sixty to complete .the conquest of Southern 
Britain, and that the conquest of the bulk of the island 
was only wrought out after two centuries of bitter war- 
fare. But it was just through the length of the struggle 
that of all the German conquests this proved the most 
thorough and complete. So far as the English sword in 
these earlier days had reached, Britain had become Eng- 
~ Jand, a land, that is, not of Britons but of Englishmen. 
Even if a few of the vanquished people lingered as slaves 
round the homesteads of their English conquerors, or a few 
of their household words mingled with the English tongue, 
doubtful exceptions such as these leave the main facts un- 
touched. The keynote of the conquest was firmly struck. 
When the English invasion was stayed fora while by the 
civil wars of the invaders, the Briton had disappeared from 
the greater part of the land which had been his own; and 
the tongue, the religion, the laws of his English conquer- 
ors reigned without a break from Essex to Staffordshire 
and from the British Channel to the Firth of Forth. 

For the driving out of the Briton was, as we have seen, 
but a prelude to the settlement of his conqueror. What 
strikes us at once in the new England is this, that it was 
the one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of 
Rome. In other lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though 
they were equally conquered by German peoples, relig- 
ion, social life, administrative order, still remained Roman. 
Britain was almost the only province of the Empire where 
Rome died into a vague tradition of the past. The whole 
organization of government and society disappeared with 
the people who used it. Roman roads indeed still led to 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 31 


desolate cities. Roman camps still crowned hill and down. 

The old divisions of the land remained to furnish bounds 

of field and farm forthe new settlers. The Roman church, 

the Roman country-house, was left standing, though reft 

of priest and lord. But Rome was gone. ‘The mosaics, 
the coins which we dig up in our fields are no relics of our 
English fathers, but of a world which our fathers’ sword 

swept utterly away. Its law, its literature, its manners, 

its faith, went with it. Nothing was a stronger proof of 
the completeness of this destruction of all Roman life than 

the religious change which passed over the land. Alone 

among the German assailants of Rome the English stood 

aloof from the faith of the Empire they helped to over- — 
thr6w. The new England was a heathen country. 

Homestead and boundary, the very days of the week, 
bore the names of new gods who displaced Christ. 

As we stand amidst the ruins of town or country-house 
which recall to us the wealth and culture of Roman 
Britain, it is hard to believe that a conquest which 
left them heaps of crumbling stones was other than 
a curse to the land over which it passed. But if the 
new England which sprang from the wreck of Britain 
seemed for the moment a waste from which the arts, 
the letters, the refinement of the world had fled hope- 
lessly away, it contained within itself germs of a nobler 
life than that which had been destroyed. The base 
of Roman society here as everywhere throughout the 
Roman world was the slave, the peasant who had 
been crushed by tyranny, political and social, into serf- 
dom. ~The base of the new English society was the 
freeman whom we have seen tilling, judging, or fight- 
ing for himself by the Northern Sea. However roughly 
he dealt with the material civilization of Britain while 
the struggle went on, it was impossible that such a 
man could be a mere destroyer. War in fact was 
no sooner over than the warrior settled down into the 
farmer, and the home of the ceorl rose beside the heap of 
goblin-haunted stones that marked the site of the villa he 
had burned. The settlement of the English in the con- 
quered land was nothing less than an absolute transfer of 


on HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


English society in its completest form to the soil of Brit- 
ain. The slowness of their advance, the small numbers 
of each separate band in its descent upon the coast, made 
it possible for the invaders to bring with them, or to call 
to them when their work was done, the wives and chil- 
dren, the let and slave, even the cattle they had left be- 
hind them. The first wave of conquest was but the pre- 
lude to the gradual migration of a whole people. It was 
England which settled down on British soil, England with 
its own language, its own laws, its complete social fabric, 
its system of village life and village culture, its town- 
ship and its hundred, its principle of kinship, its 
principle of representation. It was not as mere pirates 
or stray war-bands, but as peoples already made, and 
fitted by a common temper and common customs to draw 
together into our English nation in the days to come, that 
our fathers left their German home-land for the land in 
which we live. Their social and political organization re- 
mained radically unchanged. In each of the little king- 
doms which rose on the wreck of Britain the host eamped 
ou the land it had won, and the divisions of the host sup- 
plied here as in its older home the rough groundwork of 
local distribution. The land occupied by the hundred 
warriors who formed the unit of military organization be- 
came perhaps the local hundred ; but it is needless to at- 
tach any notion of precise uniformity, either in the num- 
ber of settlers or in the area of their settlement, to such 
a process as this, any more than to the army organization 
which the process of distribution reflected. From the large 
amount of public land which we find existing afterwards 
it has been conjectured with some probability that the num- 
ber of settlers was far too small to occupy the whole of the 
country at their disposal, and this unoccupied ground be- 
came * folk-land,” the common property of the tribe as at a 
later time of the nation. What ground was actually oceu- 
pied may have been assigned to each group and each family 
in the group by lot, and Eorl and Ceorl gathered round 
them their let and slave as in their homeland by the Rhine 
or the Elbe. And with the English people passed to the 
shores of Britain all that was to make Englishmen what 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 30 


they are. For distant and dim as their life in that older 
England may have seemed to us, the whole after-life of 
Englishmen was there. In its village-moots lay our Par- 
lament; in the gleeman of its village-feasts our Chaucer 
and our Shakspere ; in the pirate-bark stealing from creek 
to creek our Drakes and our Nelsons. Even the national 
temper was fully formed. Civilization, letters, science, 
religion itself, have done little to change the inner mood 
of Englishmen. That love of venture and of toil, of the 
sea and the fight, that trust in manhood and the might of 
man, that silent awe of the mysteries of life and death 
which lay deep in English souls then as now, passed with | 
Englishmen to the land which Englishmen had won. 
But though English society passed thus in its complete- 
ness to the soil of Britain its primitive organization was 
affected in more ways than one by the transfer. In the 
first place conquest begat the King. It seems probable 
that the English had hitherto known nothing of Kings in 
their own fatherland, where each tribe was satisfied in 
peace time with the customary government of village-reeve 
and hundred-reeve and Ealdorman, while it gathered at 
fighting times under war leaders whom it chose for each 
campaign. But in the long and obstinate wai fare which 
they waged against the Britons it was needful to find a 
common leader whom the various tribes engaged in con- 
quests such as those of Wessex or Mercia might follow ; 
and the ceaseless character of a struggle which left few in- 
tervals of rest or peace raised these leaders into a higher 
position than that of temporary chieftains. It was no 
doubt from this cause that we find Hengest and his son 
isc raised.to the kingdom in Kent, or Ai‘lle in Sussex, or 
Cerdic und Cynric among the West Saxons. The asso- 
ciation of son with father in this new kingship marked the 
hereditary character which distinguished it from the tem- 
porary office ofan Ealdorman. The change was undoubt- 
edly a great one, but it was less than the modern concep- 
tion of kingship would lead us toimagine. Hereditary as 
the succession was within a single house, each successive 
King was still the free choice of his people, and for centu- 
ries to come it was held within a people’s right to pass over 


34 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


a claimant too weak or too wicked for the throne. In war 
indeed the King was supreme. But in peace his power was 
narrowly bounded by the customs of his people and the 
rede of his wise men. Justice was not as yet the King’s 
justice, it was the justice of village and hundred and folk 
in town-moot and hundred-moot and folk-moot. It was 
only with the assent of the wise men that the King could 
make laws and declare war and assign public lands and 
name public officers. Above all, should his will be to 
break through the free customs of his people, he was with- 
out the means of putting his will into action, for the one 
force he could call on was the host, and the host was the 
people itself in arms. 

With the new English King rose a new order of Eng- 
lish nobles. The social distinction of the Eorl was 
founded on the peculiar purity of his blood, on his long 
descent from the original settler around whom township 
and thorpe grew up. A new distinction was now to be 
found in service done to the King. From the earliest 
times of German society it had been the wont of young 
men greedy of honor or seeking training in arms to bind 
themselves as “ comrades” to king or chief. The leader 
whom they chose gave them horses, arms, a seat in his 
mead hall, and gifts from his hoard. The “ comrade”. on 
the other hand—the gesith or thegn, as he was called— 
. bound himself to follow and fight for his lord. The prin- 
ciple of personal dependence as distinguished from the 
warrior’s general duty to the folk at large was embodied 
in the thegn. “Chieftains fight for victory,” says 
Tacitus ; “comrades for their chieftain.” When one of 
Beowulf’s “comrades” saw his lord hard bested ‘ he 
minded him of the homestead he had given him, of the 
folk-right he gave him as his father had it; nor might he 
hold back then.” Snatching up sword and shield he 
called on his fellow-thegns to follow him to the fight. 
‘“T mind me of the day,” he cried, “* when we drank the 
mead, the day we gave pledge to our lord in the beer 
hall as he gave us these rings, our pledge that we would 
pay him back our war-gear, our helms and our hard 
swords, if need befell him. Unmeet is it, methinks, that 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 35 


we should bear back our shields to our home unless we 
guard our lord’s life.’ The larger the band of such 
‘‘comrades,” the more power and repute it gave their 
lord. It was from among the chiefs whose war-band was 
strongest that the leaders of the host were commonly 
chosen; and as these leaders grew into kings, the number 
of their thegns naturally increased. The rank of the 
“comrades” too rose with the rise of their lord. The 
king’s thegns were his body-guard, the one force ever 
ready to carry out his will. They were his nearest and 
most constant counsellors. As the gathering of petty 
tribes into larger kingdoms swelled the number of eorls | 
in each realm and in a corresponding degree diminished 
their social importance, it raised in equal measure the 
rank of the king’s thegns. A post among them was soon 
coveted and won by the greatest and noblest in the land. 
Their service was rewarded by exemption from the gen- 
eral jurisdiction of hundred-court or shire-court, for it 
was part of a theen’s meed for his service that he should 
be judged only by the lord he served. Other meed was 
found in grants of public land which made them a local 
nobility, no longer bound to actual service in the king’s 
household or the king’s war-band, but still bound to him 
by personal ties of allegiance far closer than those which 
bound an eorl to the chosen war-leader of the tribe. In 
a word, thegnhood contained within itself the germ of 
that later feudalism which was to battle so fiercely with 
the Teutonic freedom out of which it grew. 

But the strife between the conquering tribes which at 
once followed on their conquest of Britain was to bring 
about changes even more momentous in the develope- 
ment of the English people. While Jute and Saxon and 
Engle were making themselves masters of central and 
southern Britain, the English who had landed on its 
northernmost shores had been slowly winning for them- 
selves the coast district between the Forth and the Tyne 
which bore the name of Bernicia. Their progress seems 
to have been small till they were gathered into a king- 
dom in 547 by Ida the “ Flame-bearer” who found a site 
for his King’s town on the impregnable rock of Bam- 


36 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 


borough; nor was it till the reign of his fourth son 
Kthelric that they gained full mastery over the Britons 
along their western border. But once masters ot the 
Britons the Bernician Englishmen turned to conquer 
their English neighbours to the south, the men of Deira, 
whose first King Ailla was now sinking to the grave. 
The struggle filled the foreign markets with English 
slaves, and one of the most memorable stories in our 
history shows us a group of such captives as they stood 
in the market-place of Rome, it may be in the great 
Forum of Trajan which still in its decay recalled the 
glories of the Imperial City. Their white bodies, their 
fair faces, their golden hair was noted by a deacon who 
passed by. “ From what country do these slaves come?” 
Gregory asked the trader who brought them. The slave- 
dealer answered “ They are English,” or as the word ran 
in the Latin form it would bear at Rome “ they are 
Angles.” The deacon’s pity veiled itself in poetic humor. 
“ Not Angles but Angels,” he said, “with faces so angel- 
like! From what country come they?” ‘ They come,” 
said the merchant “from Deira.” ‘“ De iré/” was the 
untranslatable word-play of the vivacious Roman—* aye, 
plucked from God’s ire and called to Christ’s mercy! 
And what is the name of their king?” ‘They told him 
« /Ella,” and Gregory seized on the word as of good 
omen. ‘“ Alleiuia shall be sung in Aélla’s land,” he said, 
and passed on, musing how the angel-faces should be 
brought to sing it. 

While Gregory was thus playing with /Ella’s name 
the old King passed away, and with his death in 589 
the resistance of his kingdom seems to have ceased. 
His house fled over the western border to find refuge 
among the Welsh, and A‘thelric of Bernicia entered 
Deira in triumph. <A new age of our history opens in 
this submission of one English people to another. — 
When the two kingdoms were united under a common 
lord the period of national formation began. If a new 
England sprang out of the mass of English states which 
covered Britain after its conquest, we owe it to the 
gradual submission of the smaller peoples to the su- 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. oy 


premacy of a common political head. ‘The difference in 
power between state and state which inevitably led to 
this process of union was due to the character which the 
conquest of Britain was now assuming. Up to this 
time all the kingdoms which had been established by 
the invaders had stood in the main on a footing of 
equality. All had taken an independent share in the 
work of conquest. Though the oneness of a common 
blood and a common speech was recognized by all we 
find no traces of any common action or common rule. 
Even in the two groups of kingdoms, the five English 
and the five Saxon kingdoms, which occupied Britain » 
south of the Humber, the relations of each member of 
the group to its fellows seem to have been merely local. 
It was only locally that East and West and South and 
North English were grouped round the Middle English 
of Leicester, or East and West and South and North 
Saxons round the Middle Saxons about London. In 
neither instance do we find any real trace of a con- 
federacy, or of the rule of one member of the group over 
the others; while north of the Humber the feeling be- 
tween the Englishmen of Yorkshire and the Englishmen 
who had settled towards the Firth of Forth was one of 
hostility rather than of friendsbip. But this age of 
isolation, of equality, of independence, had now come to 
an end. The progress of the conquest had drawn a 
sharp line between the kingdoms of the conquerors. The 
work of half of them was done. In the south of the 
island not only Kent but Sussex, Essex, and Middlesex 
were surrounded by English territory, and hindered by 
that single fact from all further growth. The same fate 
had befallen the East Engle, the South Engle, the Middle 
and the North Engle. The West Saxons on the other 
hand and the West Engle, or Mercians, still remained 
free to conquer and expand on t!:e south of the Humber, 
as the Englishmen of Deira and Bernicia remained free 
to the north of that river. It was plain therefore that 
from this moment the growth of these powers would 
throw their fellow kingdoms into the background, and 
that with an ever-growing inequality of strength must 


38 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


come a new arrangement of political forces. The greater 
kingdoms would in the end be drawn to subject and 
absorb the lesser ones, and to the war between English- 
man and Briton would be added a struggle between Eng- 
lishman and Englishman. 

It was through this struggle and the establishment of 
a lordship on the part of the stronger and growing states 
over their weaker and stationary fellows that the English 
kingdoms were to make their first step towards union in 
asingle England. Such an overlordship seemed destined 
but a few years before to fall to the lot of Wessex. ‘The 
victories of Ceawlin and Cuthwulf left it the largest of 
the English kingdoms. None of its fellow states seemed 
able to hold their own against a power which stretched 
from the Chilterns to the Severn and from the Channel to 
the Ouse. But after its defeat in the march upon Chester 
Wessex suddenly broke down into a chaos of warring 
tribes ; and her place was taken by two powers whose rise 
to greatness was as sudden as her fall. The first of 
these was Kent. The Kentish King Athelberht found 
himself hemmed in on every side by English territory ; 
and since conquest over Britons was denied him he sought 
a new sphere of action in setting his kingdom at the head 
of the conquerors of the south. The break up of Wessex 
no doubt aided his attempt; but we know little of the 
causes or events which brought about his success. We 
know only that the supremacy of the Kentish King was 
owned at last by the English peoples of the east and centre 
of Britain. But it was not by her political action that 
Kent was in the end to further the creation of a single 
England ; for the lordship which thelberht built up was 
doomed to fall for ever with his death, and yet his death 
left Kent the centre of a national union far wider as it was 
far more enduring than the petty lordship which stretched 
over Eastern Britain. Years had passed by since Gregory 
pitied the English slaves in the market-place of Rome. 
A\s Bishop of the Imperial City he at last found himself 
in a position to carry out his dream of winning Britain to 
the faith, and an opening was given him by Athelberht’s 
marriage with Bercta, a daughter of the Frankish King 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 39 


Charibert of Paris. Bercta like her Frankish kindred was 
a Christian; a Christian Bishop accompanied her from 
Gaul; and a ruined Christian church, the church of 
St. Martin beside the royal city of Canterbury, was given 
them for their worship. The King himself remained true 
to the gods of his fathers ; but his marriage no doubt en- 
couraged Gregory to send a Roman abbot, Augustine, at 
the head of a band of monks to preach the Gospel to the 
English people. The missionaries landed in 597 in the 
Isle of Thanet, at the spot where Hengest had landed 
more than a century before; and Athelberht received 
them sitting in the open air on the chalk-down above 
Minster where the eye nowadays catches miles away 
over the marshes the dim tower of Canterbury. The 
King listened patiently to the long sermon of Augustine as 
the interpreters the abbot had brought with him from 
Gaul rendered it in the English tongue. ‘ Your words 
are fair,” /Xthelberht replied at last with English good 
sense, ‘but they are new and of doubtful meaning.” For 
himself, he said, he refused to forsake the gods of his 
fathers, but with the usual religious tolerance of the 
German race he promised shelter and protection to the 
strangers. The band of monks entered Canterbury bear- 
ing before them a silver cross with a picture of Christ, 
and singing in concert the strains of the litany of their 
Church. “ Turn from this city, O Lord,” they sang, 
“ Thine anger and wrath, and turn it from Thy holy house, 
for we have sinned.’ And then in strange contrast came 
the jubilant cry of the older Hebrew worship, the cry 
which Gregory had wrested in prophetic earnestness from 
the name of the Yorkshire king in the Roman market- 
place, “ Alleluia! ” 
It was thus that the spot which witnessed the landing 
of Hengest became yet better known as the landing-place 
of Augustine. But the second landing at Ebbsfleet was 
in no small measure a reversal and undoing of the first. 
“Strangers from Rome” was the title with which the 
missionaries first fronted the English king. The march of 
the monks as they chaunted their solemn litany was in one 
sense a return of the Roman legions who withdrew. at the 


40 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


trumpet-call of Alaric. It was to the tongue and the 
thought not of Gregory only but of the men whom his 
Jutish fathers had slaughtered or driven out that Authel- 
berht listened in the preaching of Augustine. Canterbury, 
the earliest royal city of German England, became a 
centre of Latin influence. The Roman tongue became 
again one of the tongues of Britain, the language of its 
worship, its correspondence, its literature. But more than 
the tongue of Rome returned with Augustine. Practically 
his landing renewed that union with the Western world 
which the landing of Hengest had destroyed. The new 
England was admitted into the older commonwealth of 
nations. The civilization, art, letters, which had fled 
before the sword of the English conquerors returned with 
the Christian faith. The great fabric of the Roman law 
indeed never took root in England, but it is impossible 
not to recognize the result of the influence of the Roman 
missionaries in the fact that codes of the customary 
English law began to be put in writing soon after their 
arrival. 

A year passed ere Aithelberht yielded to the preaching 
of Augustine. Butfrom the moment of his conversion the 
new faith advanced rapidly and the Kentish men crowded 
to baptism in the train of their king. The new religion 
was carried beyond the bounds of Kent by the supremacy 
which Aithelberht wielded over the neighboring king- 
doms. Seberht, King of the East-Saxons, received a bishop 
sent from Kent, and suffered him to build up again a 
Christian church in what was now his subject city of Lon- 
don, while the East-Anglian King Redwald resolved to 
serve Christ and the older gods together. But while 
AKthelberht was thus furnishing a future centre of spiritual 
unity in Canterbury, the see to which Augustine was con- 
secrated, the growth of Northumbria was pointing it out 
as the coming political centre of the new England. In 
593, four years before the landing of the missionaries in 
Kent, Aithelric was succeeded by his son Athelfrith, and 
the new king took up the work of conquest with a vigor 
greater than had yet been shown by any English leader, 
For ten years he waged war with the Britons of Strath- 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1701. 41 


clyde, a tract stretching along his western border from 
Dumbarton to Carlisle. The contest ended in a great 
battle at Degsa’s Stan, perhaps Dawston in Liddesdale ; 
and AXthelfrith turned to deliver a yet more crushing 
blow on his southern border. British kingdoms still 
stretched from Clyde-mouth to the mouth of Severn ; 
and had their line remained unbroken the British resist- 
ance might yet have withstood the English advance. It 
was with ‘a sound political instinct therefore that A‘thel- 
frith marched in 607 upon Chester, the point where the 
kingdom of Cumbria, a kingdom which stretched from the 
Lune to the Dee, linked itself to the British states of 
what we now call Wales. Hardby the city two thousand 
monks were gathered in one of those vast religious settle- 
ments which were characteristic of Celtic Christianity, 
and after a three days’ fast a crowd of these ascetics fol- 
lowed the British army to the field. Acthelfrith watched 
the wild gestures of the monks as they stood apart from 
the host with arms outstretched in prayer, and bade his 
men slay them in the coming fight. ‘Bear they arms or 
no,” said the King, “they war against us when they cry 
against us to their God,’ and in the surprise and rout 
which followed the monks were the first to fall. 

With the battle of Chester Britain, as a single political 
body, ceased to exist. By their victory at Deorham the 
West-Saxons had cut off the Britons of Dorset, Somerset, 
Devon, and Cornwall from the general body of their race. 
By Aithelfrith’s victory at Chester and the reduction of 
southern Lancashire which followed it what remained of 
Britain was broken into two several parts. From this 
time therefore the character of the English conquest of 
Britain changes. The warfare of Briton and Englishman 
died down into a warfare of separate English kingdoms 
against separate British kingdoms, of Northumbria against 
Cumbria and Strathclyde, of Mercia against modern 
Wales, of Wessex against the tract of British country 
from Mendip to the Land’s End. But great as was the 
importance of the battle of Chester to the fortunes of 
Britain, it was of still greater importance to the fortunes 
of England itself. The drift towards national unity had 


42 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


already Degun, but from the moment of Atthelfrith’s vic- 
tory tnis drift became the main current of our history. 
Masters of the larger and richer part of the land, its con- 
querors were no longer drawn greedily westward by the 
hope of plunder; while the severance of the British king- 
doms took from their enemies the pressure of a common 
danger. The conquests of Aithelfrith left him without a 
yival in military power, and he turned from victories over 
the Welsh, as their English foes called the Britons, to 
the building up of a lordship over his own countrymen. 
The power of Atthelberht seems to have declined with 
old age, and though the Essex men still owned his suprem- 
acy, the English tribes of Mid-Britain shook it off. So 
strong however had the instinct of union now become, 
that we hear nothing of any return to their old isolation. 
Mercians and Southumbrians, Middle-English and South- 
English now owned the lordship of the East-English King 
Redwald. The shelter given by Redwald to Aélla’s son 
Eadwine served as a pretext for a Northumbrian attack. 
Fortune however deserted /Mthelfrith, and a snatch of 
northern song still tells of the day when the river Idle by 
Retford saw his defeat and fall. But the greatness of 
Northumbria survived its king. In 617 Eadwine was wel- 
comed back by his own men of Deira; and his conquest of 
Bernicia maintained that union of the two realms which 
the Bernician conquest of Deira had first brought about. 
The greatness of Northumbria now reached its height. 
Within his own dominions, Eadwine displayed a genius 
for civil government which shews how utterly the mere 
age of conquest had passed away. With him began the 
English proverb so often applied to after kings: “A 
woman with her babe might walk scatheless from sea to 
sea in Eadwine’s day.” Peaceful communication revived 
along the deserted highways; the springs by the road- 
side were marked with stakes, and a cup of brass set 
beside each for the traveller's refreshment. Some faint 
traditions of the Roman past may have flung their glory 
round this new “ Empire of the English;” a royal stand- 
ard of purple and gold floated before Eadwine as he rode 
through the villages; a feather tuft attached to a spear, 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1701. 43 


the Roman tufa, preceded him as he walked through the 
streets. Fhe Northumbrian king became in fact supreme 
over Britain as no king of English blood had been be- 
fore. Northward his frontier reached to the Firth of 
Forth, and here, if we trust tradition, Eadwine founded 
a city which bore his name, Edinburgh, Eadwine’s burgh. 
To the west his arms crushed the long resistance of 
Elmet, the district about Leeds; he was master of Ches- 
ter, and the fleet he equipped there subdued the isles of 
Anglesea and Man. South of the Humber he was owned 
as overlord by the five English states of Mid-Britain. 
The West-Saxons remained awhile independent. But 
revolt and slaughter had fatally broken their power 
when Eadwine attacked them. A story preserved by 
Beda tells something of the fierceness of the struggle 
which ended in the subjection of the south to the over- 
lordship of Northumbria. In an Easter-court which he 
held in his royal city by the river Derwent, Eadwine 
gave audience to Eumer, an envoy of Wessex, who 
brought a message from its king. In the midst of the 
conference Eumer started to his feet, drew a dagger from 
his robe, and rushed on the Northumbrian sovereign. 
Lilla, one of the King’s war-band, threw himself between 
Eadwine and his assassin; but so furious was the stroke 
that even through Lilla’s body the dagger still reached 
its aim. The king however recovered from his wound 
to march on the West-Saxons; he slew or subdued all 
who had conspired against him, and returned victorious 
to his own country. 

Kent had bound itself to him by giving him its King’s 
daughter as a wife, a step which probably marked politi- 
eal subordination ; and with the Kentish queen had come 
Paulinus, one of Augustine’s followers, whose tall stoop- 
ing form, slender aquiline nose, and black hair falling 
round a thin worn face, were long remembered in the 
North. Moved by his queen’s prayers Eadwine promised 
to become Christian if he returned successful from Wes- 
sex; and the wise men of Northumbria gathered to de- 
liberate on the new faith to which he bowed. To finer 
minds its charm lay then as now in the light it threw on 


44 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the darkness which encompassed men’s lives, the dark- 
ness of the future as of the past. ‘So seems the life of 
man, O king,” burst forth an aged Ealdorman “as a spar- 
row’s flight through the hall when a man is sitting at 
meat in winter-tide with the warm fire lighted on the 
hearth but the chill rain-storm without. The sparrow 
flies in at one door and tarries for a moment in the light 
and heat of the hearth-fire, and then flying forth from 
the other vanishes into the wintry darkness whence it 
came. So tarries for a moment the hfe of man in our 
sight, but what is before it, what after it, we know not. 
If this new teaching tell us aught certainly of these, let 
us follow it.” Coarser argument told on the crowd. 
“None of your people, Eadwine, have worshipped the 
gods more busily than I,” said Coifi the priest, “ yet there 
are many more favored and more fortunate. Were 
these gods good for anything they would help their wor- 
shippers.” Then leaping on horseback, he hurled his 
spear into the sacred temple at Godmanham, and with 
the rest of the Witan embraced the religion of the king. 
But the faith of Woden and Thunder was not to fall 
without a struggle. Even in Kent a reaction against the 
new creed began with the death of Athelberht. The 
young Kings of the East-Saxons burst into the church 
where the Bishop of London was administering the 
Eucharist to the people, crying “ Give us that white 
bread you gave to our father Saba,” and on the bishop’s 
refusal drove him from their realm. This earlier tide of 
reaction was checked by Eadwine’s conversion; but 
Mercia, which had as yet owned the supremacy of North- 
umbria, sprang into a sudden greatness as the champion 
of the heathen gods. Its King, Penda, saw in the rally 
of the old religion a chance of winning back his people’s 
freedom and giving it the lead among the tribes about it. 
Originally mere settlers along the Upper Trent, the posi- 
tion of the Mercians on the Welsh border invited them 
to widen their possessions by conquest while the rest of 
- their Anglian neighbors were shut off from any chance 
of expansion. Their fights along the frontier too kept 
their warlike energy at its height. Penda must have al- 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 45 


ready asserted his superiority over the four other Eng- 
lish tribes of Mid-Britain before he could have ventured 
to attack Wessex and tear from it in 628 the country of 
the Hwiccas and Magesetas on the Severn. Even with 
this accession of strength however he was still no match 
for Northumbria. But the war of the English people - 
with the Britons seems at this moment to have died 
down fora season, and the Mercian ruler boldlv broke 
through the barrier which had parted the two races till 
now by allying himself with a Welsh King, Cadwallon, 
for a joint attack on Eadwine. The armies met in 633 
at a place called Heethfeld, and in the fight which fol- 
lowed Eadwine was defeated and slain. 

Bernicia seized on the fall of Eadwine to recall the line 
of Aithelfrith to its throne; and after a year of anarchy 
his second son, Oswald, became its King. The Welsh had 
remained encamped in the heart of the north,and Oswald’s 
first fight was with Cadwallon. A small Northumbrian 
force gathered in 635 near the Roman Wall, and pledged 
itself at the new King’s bidding to become Christian if 
it conquered in the fight. Cadwallon fell fighting on 
the “ Heaven’s Field,” as after times called the field of 
battle ; the submission of Deira té the conqueror restored 
the kingdom of Northumbria; and for nine years the 
power of Oswald equalled that of Eadwine. It was not 
the Church of Paulinus which nerved Oswald to this 
struggle for the Cross, or which carried out in Bernicia 
the work of conversion which his victory began. Pau- 
linus fled from Northumbria at Eadwine’s fall; and the 
Roman Church, though established in Kent, did little in 
contending elsewhere against the heathen reaction. Its 
place in the conversion of northern England was taken 
by missionaries from Ireland. To understand the true 
meaning of this charge we must remember how greatly 
the Christian Church in the west had been affected by 
the Germaninvasion. Before the landing of the English 
in Britain the Christian church stretched in an un- 
broken line across Western Europe to the furthest 
coasts of Ireland. The conquest of Britain by the pagan» 
English thrust a wedge of heathendom into the heart of 


46 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


this great communion and broke it into two unequal parts. 
On one side lay Italy, Spain, and Gaul, whose churches 
owned obedience to and remained in direct contact with 
the See of Rome, on the other, practically cut off from the 
general: hody of Christendom, lay the Church of Ireland. 
But the condition of the two portions of Western Chris- 
tendom was very different. While the vigor of Christi- 
anity in Italy and Gaul and Spain was exhausted in a 
bare struggle for life, Ireland, which remained unscourged 
by invaders, drew from its conversion an energy such as 
it has never known since. Christianity was received 
there with a burst of popular enthusiasm, and letters and 
arts sprang up rapidly in its train. The science and 
Biblical knowledge which fled from the Continent took 
refuge in its schools. The new Christian life soon beat 
too strongly to brook confinement within the bounds of 
Ireland itself. Patrick, the first missionary of the island, 
had not been half a century dead when Irish Christianity 
flung itself with a fiery zeal into battle with the mass of 
heathenism which was rolling in upon the Christian 
world. Irish missionaries labored among the Picts of 
the Highlands and among the Frisians of the northern 
seas. An Irish missidhary, Columban, founded monas- 
teries in Burgundy and the Apennines. The canton of 
St. Gall still commemorates in its name another Irish 
missionary before whom the spirits of flood and fell fled 
wailing over the waters of the Lake of Constance. For 
a time it seemed as if the course of the world’s history 
was to be changed, as if the older Celtic race that Roman 
and German had swept before them had turned to the 
moral conquest of their conquerors, as if Celtic and not 
Latin Christianity was to mould the destinies of the 
Churches of the West. 

On a low island of barren gniess-rock off the west coasu 
of Scotland an Irish refugee, Columba, had raised the 
famous mission-station of Iona. It was within its walls 
that Oswald in youth found refuge, and on his accession 
to the throne of Northumbria he called for missionaries 
from among its monks. The first preacher sent in answer 
to his call obtained little success. He declared on his re 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 47 


turn that among a people so stubborn and barbarous as 
the Northumbrian folk success was impossible. ‘ Was 
it their stubbornness or your severity?” asked Aidan, a 
brother sitting by ; ‘did you forget God’s word to give 
them the milk first and then the meat?” All eyeseturned 
on the speaker as fittest to undertake the abandoned 
mission, and Aidan sailing at their bidding fixed his 
bishop’s see in the island-peninsula of Lindisfarne. 
Thence, from a monastery which gave to the spot its after 
name of Holy Island, preachers poured forth over the 
heathen realms. Aidan himself wandered on _ foot, 
preaching among the peasants of Yorkshire and North- 
umbria. In his own court the King acted as interpreter 
to the Irish missionaries in their efforts to convert his 
thegns. A new conception of kingship indeed began to 
blend itself with that of the warlike glory of Athelfrith 
or the wise administration of Eadwine, and the moral 
power which was to reach its height in Alfred first 
dawns in the story of Oswald. For after times the 
memory of Oswald's greatness was lost in the memory 
of his piety. ‘ By reason of his constant habit of pray- 
ing or giving thanks to the Lord he was wont wherever 
he sat to hold his hands upturned on his knees.” As he 
feasted with Bishop Aidan by his side, the thegn, or noble 
of his war-band, whom he had set to give alms to the 
poor at his gate told him of a multitude that still waited 
fasting without. The King at once bade the untasted 
meat betore him be carried to the poor, and his silver dish 
be parted piecemeal among them. Aidan seized the 
royal hand and blessed it. ‘“ May this hand,” he cried, 
“never grow old.” 

Oswald’s lordship stretched as widely over Britain as 
that of his predecessor Eadwine. In him even more than 
in Eadwine men saw some faint likeness of the older 
Emperors; once indeed a writer from the land of the Picts 
calls Oswald “ Emperor of the whole of Britain.” His 
power was bent to carry forward the conversion of all 
England, but prisoned as it was to the central districts 
of the country heathendom fought desperately for life. 
Penda was still its rallying-point. His long reign was 


48° HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


one continuous battle with the new religion ; but it was 
a battle rather with the supremacy of Christian North- 
umbria than with the supremacy of the Cross. East- 
Anglia became at last the field of contest between the two 
powers§ and in 642 Oswald marched to deliver it from 
the Mercian rule. But his doom was the doom of Eadwine, 
and in a battle called the battle of the Maserfeld he was 
overthrown and slain. For afew years after his victory at 
the Maserfeld, Penda stood supreme in Britain. Heathen- 
ism triumphed with him. If Wessex did not own his over- 
lordship as it had owned that of Oswald, its King threw off 
the Christian faith which he had. embraced but a few 
years back at the preaching of Birinus. Even Deira seems 
to have owned Penda’s sway. LBernicia alone, though 
distracted by civil war between rival claimants for its 
throne, refused to yield. Year by year the Mercian King 
carried his ravages over the north; once he reached even 
the royal city, the impregnable rock-fortress of Bam- 
borough. Despairing of success in an assault, he pulled 
down the cottages around, and piling their wood against 
its walls fired the mass in a fair wind that drove the 
flames on the town. “See, Lord, whatill Penda is doing,” 
cried Aidan from his hermit cell in the islet of Farne, as 
he saw the smoke drifting over the city, and a change of 
wind—so ran the legend of Northumbria’s agony—drove 
back the flames on those who kindled them. But burned 
and harried as it was, Bernicia still fought for the Cross. 
Oswiu, a third son of Acthelfrith, held his ground stoutly 
against Penda’s inroads till their cessation enabled him 
to build up again the old Northumbrian kingdom bya 
a march upon Deira. The union of the two realms was 
never henceforth to be dissolved; and its influence was 
at once seen in the renewal of Christianity throughout 
Britain. East Anglia, conquered as it was, had clung to its 
faith. Wessex quietly became Christian again. Penda’s 
own son, whom he had set over the Middle English, re- 
ceived baptism and teachers from Lindisfarne. At last 
the missionaries of the new belief appeared fearlessly 
among the Mercians themselves. Penda gave them no 
hindrance. In words that mark the temper of a man of 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 49 


whom we would willingly know more, Beda tells us that 
the old King only “ hated and scorned those whom he saw 
not doing the works of the faith they had received.” His 
attitude shows that Penda looked with the tolerance of his 
race on all questions of creed, and that he was fighting 
less for heathenism than for political independence. And 
now the growing power of Oswiu called him to the old 
struggle with Northumbria. In 655 he met Oswiu in the 
field of Winwed by Leeds. It was in vain that the 


Northumbrian sought to avert Penda’s attack by offers of 


ornaments and costly gifts. “If the pagans will not 
accept them,” Oswiu cried at last, “let us offer them to 
One that will;” and he vowed that if successful he 
would dedicate his daughter to God, and endow twelve 
monasteriesin his realm. Victory at last declared for the 
faith of Christ. Penda himself fell on the field. The 
river over which the Mercians fled was swollen with a 
oreat rain; it swept away the fragments of the heathen 
host, and the cause of the older gods was lost forever. 
The terrible struggle between heathendom and Chris- 
tianity was followed by a long and profound peace. For 
three years after the battle of Winwzed Mercia was 
governed by Northumbrian thegns in Oswiu’s name. The 
winning of central England was a victory for Irish Chris- 
tianity as well as for Oswiu. Even in Mercia itself heathen- 
dom was dead with Penda. * Being thus freed,” Beda tells 
us, ‘the Mercians with their King rejoiced to serve the 
true King, Christ.” Its three provinces, the earlier Mer- 
cla, the Middle-F Enelish, and the Lindiswaras, were united 


in the bishopric of ‘the mi issionary Ceadda, the St. Chad to ~ 


whom Lichfield is still dedicated. Ceadda was a monk of 
Lindisfarne, so simple and lowly in temper that he trav- 
elled on foot on his long mission journeys till Archbishop 
Theodore with his own hands lifted him on horseback. 
The old Celtic poetry breaks out in his death-legend, as 
it tells us how voices of singers singing sweetly descended 
from heaven to the little cell beside St. Mary’s Church 
where the bishop lay dying. Then “the same song as- 
cended from the roof again, and returned heavenward by 
the way that itcame.” It was the soul of his brother, 


¥ 


50 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the missionary Cedd, come with a choir of angels to solace 
the last hours of Ceadda. 

In Northumbria the work of his fellow missionaries has 
almost been lost in the glory of Cuthbert. No story . 
better lights up for us the new religious life of the time 
than the story of this Apostle of the Lowlands. Born on 
the southern edge of the Lammermoor, Cuthbert found 
shelter at eight years old in a widow’s huuse in the little 
village of Wrangholm. Already in youth his robust frame 
had a poetic sensibility which caught even in the chance 
word of a game a call to higher things, and a passing at- 
tack of lameness deepened the religious impression. 
traveller coming in his white mantle over the hillside 
and stopping his horse to tend Cuthbert’s injured knee 
seemed to him an angel. The boy’s shepherd life carried 
him to the bleak upland, still famous as a sheepwalk, 
though a scant herbage scarce veils the whinstone rock. 
There meteors plunging into the night became to him a 
company of angelic spirits carrying the soul of Bishop 
Aidan heavenward, and his longings slowly settled into 
a resolute will towards a religious life. In 651 he made 
his way to a group of straw-thatched log-huts in the 
midst of untilled solitudes where a few Irish monks 
from Lindisfarne had settled in the mission-station of Mel- 
rose. To-day the land is a land of poetry and romance. 
Cheviot and Lammermoor, Ettrick and Teviotdale, Yar- 
row and Annan-water, are musical with old ballads and 
border minstrelsy.. Agriculture has chosen its valleys 
for her favorite seat, and drainage and steam-power have 
turned sedgy marshes into farm and meadow. But to see 
the Lowlands as they were in Cuthbert’s day we must 
sweep meadow and farm away again, and replace them 
by vast solitudes, dotted here and there with clusters of 
wooden hovels and crossed by boggy tracks, over which 
travellers rode spear in hand and eye kept cautiously 
about them. The Northumbrian peasantry among whom 
he journeyed were for the most part Christians only in 
name. With Teutonic indifference they yielded to their 
thegns in nominally accepting the new Christianity as 
these had yielded to the king. But they retained their 


EARLY ENGLAND. = 449—1071, 51 


old superstitions side by side with the new worship ; 
plague or mishap drove them back to a reliance on their 
heathen charms and amulets; and if trouble befell the 
Christian preachers who came settling among them, they 
took it as proof of the wrath of the older gods. When 
some log-rafts which were floating down the Tyne for the 
construction of an abbey at its mouth drifted with the 
monks who were at work on them out to sea, the rustic 
bystanders shouted, “ Let nobody pray for them; let no- 
body pity these men; for they have taken away from us 
our old worship, and how their new-fangied customs are to 
be kept nobody knows.” On foot, on horseback, Cuth- | 
bert wandered among listeners such as these, choosing 
above all the remoter mountain villages trom whose 
roughness and poverty other teachers turned aside. Un- 
like his Irish comrades, he needed no interpreter as he 
passed from village to village; the frugal, long-headed 
Northumbrians listened willingly to one who was _ him- 
self a peasant of the Lowlands, and who had caught the 
rough Northumbrian burr along the banks of the Leader. 
His patience, his humorous good sense, the sweetness of 
his look, told for him, and not less the stout vigorous 
frame which fitted the peasant-preacher for the hard life 
he had chosen. ‘Never did man die of hunger who 
served God faithfully,’ he would say, when nightfall 
~ found them supperless in the waste. ‘ Look at the eagle 
overhead! God can feed us through him if He will”— 
and once at least he owed his meal to a fish that the 
scared bird let fall. A snowstorm drove his boat on the 
coast of Fife. “The snow closes the road along the 
shore,” mourned his comrades; ‘ the storm bars our way 
over sea.” ‘There is still the way of heaven that lies 
open,” said Cuthbert. ; 
While missionaries were thus laboring among its 
peasantry, Northumbria saw the rise of a number of 
monasteries, not bound indeed by the strict ties of the 
Benedictine rule, but gathered on the loose Celtic model 
of the family or the clan round some noble and wealthy 
person who sought devotional retirement. The most 
notable and wealthy of these houses was that of Streone- 


52 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


shalh, where Hild, a woman of royal race, reared her 
abbey on the cliffs of Whitby, looking out over the 
Northern Sea. Hild was a Northumbrian Deborah whose 
counsel was sought even by kings; and the double 
monastery over which she ruled became a seminary of 
bishops and priests. The sainted John of Beverley was 
among her scholars. But the name which really throws 
glory over Whitby is the name of a cowherd from whose 
lips during the reign of Oswiu flowed the first great Eng- 
lish song. Though well advanced in years, Cedmon had 
learned nothing of the art of verse, the alliterative jingle 
so common among his fellows, ‘“‘ wherefore being some- 
times at feasts, when all agreed for glee’s sake to sing in 
turn, he no sooner saw the harp come towards him than 
he rose from the board and went homewards. Once 
when he had done thus, and gone from the feast to the 
stable where he had that night charge of the cattle, there 
appeared to him in his sleep One who said, greeting him 
by name, ‘Sing, Ceedmon, some song to Me.’ ‘I cannot 
sing,’ he answered; ‘for this cause left I the feast and 
came hither.’ He who talked with him answered * How- 
ever that be, you shall sing to Me.” *‘ What shall Ising ?’ 
rejoined Cedmon. ‘The beginning of created things,’ 
replied He. In the morning the cowherd stood before 
Hild and told his dream. Abbess and. brethren alike con- 
cluded ‘that heavenly grace had been conferred on him 
by the Lord.’ They translated for Caeedmon a passage in » 
Holy Writ, ‘bidding him, if he could, put the same into 
verse. The next morning he gave it them composed in 
excellent verse, whereon the abbess, understanding the 
divine grace in the man, bade him quit the secular habit 
and take on him the monastic life.” Piece by piece the 
sacred story was thus thrown into Cadmon’s poem. “ He 
sang of the creation of the world, of the origin of man, 
and of all the history of Israel; of their departure from 
Kgypt and entering into the Promised Land; of the in- 
carnation, passion and resurrection of Christ, and of His 
ascension ; of the terror of future judgment, the horror 
of hell-pangs, and the joys of heaven.” 

But even while Czdmon was singing the glories of 


| 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 58 


Northumbria and of the Irish Church were passing away, 
The revival of Mercia wasas rapid as its fall. Only a tew 
years alter Penuda’s defeat the Mercians threw off Oswiu’s 
yoke and set Wultfhere, a son of Penda, on their throne, 
hey were aiued in their revolt, no doubt, by a religious 
strife which was now rending the Northumbrian realm. 
The labor of Aidan, the victories of Oswald aud Oswiu, 
seemed to have annexed the north to the Irish Church. 
The monks of Lindisfarne, or of the new religious houses 
whose foundation followed that of Lindisfarne, looked for 
their ecclesiastical tradition, not to Rome but to Ireland ; 


and quoted for their guidance the instructions, not of | 


Gregory, but of Columba. Whatever claims ofsupremacy 
over the whole English Church might be pressed by the 
see of Canterbury, the real metropolitan of the Church as 
it existed in the North of England was the Abbot of Iona 
but Oswiu’s queen brought with her from Kent the loy- 
alty of the Kentish Church to the Roman see; and the visit 
of two young thegns to the Imperial city raised their love 
of Rome into a passionate fanaticism. The elder of these, 
Benedict Biscop, returned to denounce the usages in 
which the Irish Church differed from the Roman as schis- 
matic; and the vigor of his comrade Wilfrid stirred so 
hot a strife that Oswiu was prevailed upon to summon in 
664 a great council at Whitby, where the future ecclesi- 
astical allegiance of his realm should be decided. The 
' points actually contested were trivial enough. Colman, 
Aidan’s successor at Holy Island, pleaded for the Irish 
fashion of the tonsure, and for the Irish time of keeping 
Easter: Wilfrid pleaded for the Roman. The one dis- 
putant appealed to the authority of Columba, the other 
to that of St. Peter. ‘ You own,” cried the King at last 
to Colman, “ that Christ gave to Peter the keys of the 
kingdom of heaven—has He given such power to 
Columba?” The bishop could but answer “ No.” ‘Then 
will I rather obey the porter of heaven,” said Oswiu, 
*¢ Jest when I reach its gates he who has the keys in his 
keeping turns his back on me, and there be none to open,” 
The humorous tone of Oswiu’s decision could not hide its 
importance, and the synod had no sooner broken up, than 


> 


o+ HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Colman, followed by the whole of the Irish-born brethren 
and thirty of their nglish fellows, forsook the see of St. 
Aidan and sailed away to lona. ‘Lrivial in fact ag were the 
actual points of difference which severed the Roman 
Church trom the Irish, the question to which communién 
Northumbria should belong was of immense moment to the 
after fortunes of Lugland. Had the Chureh of Aidan 
finally won, the later. ecclesiastical history of England 
would probably have resembled that of Ireland. Devoid 
of that power of organization which was the strength of the 
Roman Church, the Celtic Church in its own Irish home 
took the clan system of the country as the basis of its 
government. ‘Tribal quarrels and ecclesiastical controver- 
sies became inextricably confounded ; and the clergy, rob- 
bed ofall really spiritual influence, contributed no element 
save that of disorder to the state. Hundreds of wandering 
bishops, a vast religious authority wielded by hereditary 
chieftains, the dissociation of piety from morality, the 
absence of those larger and more humanizing influences 
which contact with a wider world alone can give, this is a 
picture which the Irish Church of later times presents to 
us. It was from such a chaos as this that England was 
saved by the victory of Rome in the Synod of Whitby. 
But the success of Wilfrid dispelled:a yet greater danger. 
Had England clung to the Irish Church it must have re- 
mained spiritually isolated from the bulk of the Western 
world. Fallen as Rome might be from its older greatness, 
it preserved the traditions of civilization, of letters and 
art and law. Its faith still served as a bond which held 
together the nations that sprang from the wreck of the 
Empire. . To fight against Rome was, as Wilfrid said, 
‘“‘ to fight against the world.” To repulse Rome was to 
condemn England to isolation. Dimly as such thoughts 
may have presented themselves to Oswiu’s mind, it was 
the instinct of a statesman that led him to set aside the 
love and gratitude of his youth and to link England to 
Rome in the Synod of Whitby. pas 

_ Oswiu’s assent to the vigorous measures of organization 
undertaken by a Greek monk, Theodore of Tarsus, whom 
Rome despatched in 668 to secure England to her sway 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 55 


as Archbishop of Canterbury, marked a yet more decisive 
step in the new policy. The work of Theodore lay 
mainly in the organization of the episcopate, and thus 
the Churehof England, as we know it to-day, is the work, 
so far as its outer form is concerned, of Theodore. His 
work was determined in its main outlines by the previous 
history of the English people. The conquest of the Con- 
tinent had been wrought either by races which were al- 
ready Christian, or by heathens who bowed to the Chris- 
tian faith of the nations they conquered. To this one- 
ness of religion between the German invaders of the 
Empire and their Roman subjects was owing the preser- 
vation of all that survived of the Roman world. ‘The 
Church everywhere remained untouched. The Christian 
bishop became the defender of the conquered Italian or 
Gaul against his Gothic and Lombard conqueror, the medi- 
ator between the German and his subjects,the one bulwark 
against barbaric violence and oppression. To the bar- 
barian, on the other hand, he was the representative of 
all that was venerable in the past, the living record of law, 
of letters, and of art. But in Britain the priesthood and 
the people had been driven out together. When Theo- 
dore came to organize the Church of England, the very 
memory of the older Christian Church which existed in 
Roman Britain had passed away. The first missionaries 
to the Englishmen, strangers in a heathen land, attached 
themselves necessarily to the courts of the kings, who 
were their earliest converts, and whose conversion was 
generally followed by that of their people. The English 
bishops were thus at first royal chaplains, and their 
diocese was naturally nothing but the kingdom. In this 
way realms which are all but forgotten are commemorated 
in the limits of existing sees. That of Rochester repre- 
sented till of late an obscure kingdom of West Kent, and 
the frontier of the original kingdom of Mercia may be 
recovered by following the map of the ancient bishopric 
' of Lichfield. In adding many sees to those he found 
Theodore was careful to make their dioceses co-extensive 
with existing tribal demarcations. Buthe soon passed 
from this extension of the episcopate to its organization. 


56 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


In his arrangement of dioceses, and the way in which he 
grouped them round the see of Canterbury, in his national 
synods and ecclesiastical canons, Theodore did uncon- 
sciously a political work. The old divisions of kingdoms 
and tribes about him, divisions which had sprung for the 
inost part fron mere accidents of the conquest, were now 
fast breaking dawn. The smaller states were by this time 
practically absorbed by the three larger ones, and of these 
three Mercia and Wessex were compelled to bow to the 
superiority of Northumbria. The tendency to national 
unity which was to characterize the new England had 
thus already declared itself; but the policy of Theodore 
clothed with a sacred form and surrounded with divine 
sanctions a unity which as yet rested on no basis but the 
sword. The single throne of the one Primate at Canter- 
bury accustomed men’s minds to the thought of a single 
throne for their one temporal overlord. The regular 
subordination of priest to bishop, of bishop to primate, in 
the administration of the Church, supplied a mould on 
which the civil organization of the state quietly shaped 
itself. Above all, the councils gathered by Theodore 
were the first of our national gatherings for general legis. 
lation. It was ata much later time that the Wise Men 
of Wessex, or Northumbria, or Mercia learned to come 
together in the Witenagemote of all England. The 
synods which Theodore convened as religiously repre- 
sentative of the whole English nation led the way by 
their example to our national parliaments. The canons 
which these synods enacted led the way to a national 
system of law. 

The organization of the episcopate was followed by the 
organization of the parish system. The mission-station 
or monastery from which priest or bishop went forth on 
journey after journey to preach and baptize naturally dis- 
appeared as the land became Christian. The missionaries 
turned into settled clergy. As the King’s chaplain became 
a bishop and the kingdom his diocese, so the chaplain of an 
English noble became the priest and the manor his parish. 
But this parish svstem is probably later than Theodore, 
and the system of tithes which has been sometimes 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. AT 


coupled with his name dates only from the close of the 
eighth century. What was really due to him was the 
organization of the episcopate, and the impulse which this 
gave touational unity. But the movement towards unity 
found asudden check in the revived strength of Mercia. 
Wultfhere proved a vigorous and active ruler, and the 
peaceful reign of Oswiu left him free to build up again 
during seventeen years of rule (657-675) that Mercian 
overlordship over the tribes of mid-England which had 
been lost at Penda’s death. He had more than his father’s 
success. Not only did Essex again own his suprem- 
acy but even London fell into Mercian hands. The West- 
Saxons were driven across the Thames, and nearly all 
their settlements to the north of that river were annexed 
to the Mercian realm. Wulfhere’s supremacy soon reached 
even south of the Thames, for Sussex in its dread of 
West-Saxons found protection in accepting his overlord- 
ship, and its king was rewarded by a gift of the two 
outlying settlements of the Jutes—the Isle of Wight and 
thelands of the Meonwaras along the Southampton water 
—which we must suppose had been reduced by Mercian 
arms. The industrial progress of the Mercian kingdom 
went hand in hand with its military advance. The for- 
ests of its western border, the marches of its eastern coast, 
were being cleared and drained by monastic colonies, 
whose success shows the hold which Christianity had 
now gained over its people. Heathenism indeed still 
held its own in the wild western woodlands and in the yet 
wilder fen-country on the eastern border of the kingdom 
which stretched from the “ Holland,” the sunk, hollow 
land of Lincolnshire, to the channel of the Ouse, a wil- 
derness of shallow waters and reedy islets wrapped in 
its own dark mist-veil and tenanted only by flocks of 
screaming wild-fowl. But in either quarter the new 
faith made its way. In the western woods Bishop Ec- 
ewine found a site for an abbey round which gathered 
the town of Evesham, and the eastern fen-land was soon 
filled with religious houses. Here through the liberality 
of King Wulfhere rose the abbey of Peterborough. 
Here too, Guthlac, a youth of the royal race of Mercia, 


58 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


sought a refuge from the world in the solitudes of Crow- 
land, and so great was the reverence he won, that only 
two years had passed since his death when the stately 
Abbey of Crowland rose over his tomb. Earth was 
brought in boats to form a site; the buildings rested on 
oaken piles driven into the marsh; a great stone church 
replaced the hermit’s cell; and the toil of the new 
brotherhood changed the pools around them into fertile 
meadow-land. 

In spite however of this rapid recovery of its strength 
by Mercia Northumbria remained the dominant state in 
Britain: and Eegfrith, who succeeded Oswiu in 670, so 
utterly defeated Wulfhere when war broke out between 
them that he was glad to purchase peace by the surrender 
of Lincolnshire. Peace would have been purchased more 
hardly had not Ecgfrith’s ambition turned rather to con- — 
quests over the Briton than to victories over his fellow 
Englishmen. The war between Briton and Englishman 
which had languished since the battle of Chester had 
been revived some twelve years before by an advance of 
the West-Saxons to the south-west. Unable to save the 
possessions of Wessex north of the Thames from the 
grasp of Wulfhere, their king, Cenwalh, sought for com- 
pensation in an attack on his Welsh neighbors. A vic 
tory at Bradford on the Avon enabled him to overrun 
the country near Mendip which had till then been held by 
the Britons; and a second campaign in 658, which ended 
in a victory on the skirts of the great forest that covered 
Somerset to the east, settled the west-Saxons as con- 
querors round the sources of the Parret. It may have 
been the example of the west-Saxons which spurred Eeg- 
frith to a series of attacks upon his British neighbors 
in the west which widened the bounds of his kingdom. 
His reign marks the highest pitch of Northumbrian power. 
His armies chased the Britons from the kingdom of Cum- 
bria and made the district of Carlisle English ground. 
A large part of the conquered country was bestowed upon 
the see of Lindisfarne, which was at this time filled by 
one whom we have seen before laboring as the Apostle of 
the Lowlands. Cuthbert had found a new mission-station 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 59 


in Holy Island, and preached among the moors of North- 
umberlandas he had preached beside the banks of Tweed. 
He remained there through the great secession which 
followed on the Synod of Whitby, and became prior of 
the dwindled company of brethren, now torn with end- 
less disputes against which his patience and good humor 
struggled in vain. Worn out at last, he fled to a little 
island of basaltic rock, one of the Farne group. not far 
from Ida’s fortress of Bamborough, strewn for the most 
part with kelp and sea-weed, the home of the gull and 
the seal. In the midst of it rose his hut of rough stones 
and turf, dug down within deep into the rock, and roofed 
with logs and straw. But the reverence for his sanctity 
dragged Cuthbert back to fill the vacant see of Lindis- 
farne. He entered Carlisle, which the King had bestowed 
upon the bishopric, at a moment when all Northumbria 
was waiting for news of a fresh campaign of Ecgfrith’s 
against the Britons in the north. The Firth of Forth 
had long been the limit of Northumbria, but the Picts to 
the north ofit owned Ecgfrith’s supremacy. In 685 how- 
ever the king resolved on their actual subjection. and 
marched across the Forth. A sense of coming ill weighed 
on Northumbria, and its dread was quickened by a mem- 
ory of the curses which had been pronounced by the bishops 
of Ireland on its Kings, when his navy, setting out a year 
before from the newly-conquered western coast, swept 
the Irish shores in a raid which seemed like sacrilege to 
those who loved the home of Aidan and Columba. As 
Cuthbert bent over'a Roman fountain which still stood 
unharmed amongst the ruins of Carlisle, the anxious by- 
standers thought they caught words of ill-omen falling 
from the old man’s lips. ‘“‘ Perhaps,’ he seemed to 
murmur, “at this very hour the peril of the fight is over 
and done.” ‘Watch and pray,” he said, when they 
questioned him on the morrow; ‘‘ watch and pray.” In 
a few days more a solitary fugitive escaped from the 
slaughter told that the Picts had turned desperately to 
bay as the English army entered Fife; and that Ecgfrith 
and the flower of his nobles lay, a ghastly ring of corpses, 
on the far-off moorland of Nectansmere. 


60 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


The blow was a fatal one for Northumbrian greatness, 
for while the Picts pressed on the kingdom from the 
north /ALthelred, Wulfhere’s successor, attacked it on the 
Mercian border, and the war was only ended by a peace 
which left him master of Middle England and free to 
attempt the direct conquest of the south. For themoment 
this attempt proved a fruitless one. Mercia was still too 
weak to grasp the lordship which was slipping from 
Northumbria’s hands, while Wessex which seemed her 
destined prey rose at this moment into fresh power under 
the greatest of its early kings. Ine, the West-Saxon king 
whose reign covered the long period from 688 to 728, car- 
ried on during the whole of it the war which Centwine had 
begun. He pushed his way southward round the marshes 
of the Parret to a more fertile territory, and guarded the 
frontier of his new conquests by a wooden fort on the banks 
of the Tone which has grown into the present Taunton. 
The West-Saxons thus became masters of the whole dis- 
trict which now bears the name of Somerset. The conquest 
of Sussex and of Kent on his eastern border made Ine mas- 
ter of all Britain south of the Thames, and his repulse of 
a new Mercian King Ceolred in a bloody encounter at 
Wodnesburh in 714 seemed to establish the threefold divi- 
sion of the English race between three realms of almost 
equal power. But able as Ine was to hold Mercia at bay, he 
was unable to hush the civil strife that was the curse of 
Wessex, and a wild legend tells the story of the disgust 
which drove him from the world. He had feasted royally 
at one of his country houses, and on the morrow, as he 
rode from it, his queen bade him turn back thither. The 
king returned to find his house stripped of curtains and 
vessels, and foul with refuse and the dung of cattle, while 
in the royal bed where he had slept with Athelburh rested 
a sow with her farrow of pigs. The scene had no nee«d 
of the queen’s comment: “ See, my lord, how the fashion of 
this world passeth away!” In 726 he sought peace in a 
pilgrimage to Rome. ‘The anarchy which had driven Ine 
from the throne broke out in civil strife which left W essex 
an easy prey to A‘thelbald, the successor of Ceolred in the 
Mercian realm. Aithelbald took up with better fortune 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 61 


the struggle of his people for supremacy over the south. 
He penetrated to the very heart of the West-Saxon king- 
dom, and his siege and capture of the royal town of Somer- 
ton in 733 ended the war. For twenty years the overlord- 
ship of Mercia was recognized by all Britain south of the 
Humber. It was at the head of the forces not of Mercia 
only but of East-Anglia, Kent, and Essex, as’ well as of 
the West-Saxons, that Aithelbald marched against the 
Welsh on his western border. 3 

In so complete a mastery of the south the Mercian King 
found greunds for a hope that Northern Britain would also 
yield to hissway. But the dream ofa single England was 
again destined to be foiled: Fallen as Northumbria was 
from its old glory, it still remained a great power. Under 
the peaceful reigns of Ecgfrith’s successors, Aldfrith and 
Ceolwulf, their kingdom became the literary centre of 
Western Europe. No schools were more famous than 
those of Jarrow and York.’ The whole learning of the age 
seemed to be summed up in a Northumbrian scholar. 
Beda—the Venerable Bede as later times styled him— 
was born about ten years after the Synod of Whitby be- 
neath the shade of a great abbey which Benedict Biscop 
was rearing by the mouth of the Wear. His youth was 
trained and his long tranquil life was wholly spent in an 
offshoot of Benedict’s house which was founded by his 
scholar Ceolfrid. Beda never stirred from Jarrow. “I 
spent my whole life in the same monastery,” he says, 
‘and while attentive to the rule of my order and the ser- 
vice of the Church, my constant pleasure lay in learning, 
or teaching, or writing.” The words sketch for us a 
scholar’s lite, the more touching in its simplicity that it is 
the life of the first great English scholar. The quiet 
grandeur of a life consecrated to knowledge, the tranquil 
pleasure that lies in learning and teaching and writing, 
dawned for Englishmen in the story of Beda. While 
still young he became a teacher, and six hundred monks 
besides strangers that flocked thither for instruction 
formed his school of Jarrow. It is hard to imagine how 
among the toils of the schoolmaster and the duties of the 
monk Beda could have found time for the composition of 


62 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the numerous works that made his name famous in the 
West. But materials for study had accumulated in 
Northumbria through the journeys of Wilfrid and Bene- 
dict Biscop and the libraries which were forming at Wear- 
mouth and York. ‘The tradition of the older Irish teachers 
still lingered to direct the young scholar into that path 
of Scriptural interpretation to which he chiefly owed his 
fame. Greek, a rare accomplishment in the West, came 
to him from the school which the Greek Archbishop 
Theodore founded beneath the walls of Canterbury. His 
skill in the ecclesiastical chant was derived from agioman 
cantor whom Pope Vitalian sent in the train of Benedict 
Biscop. Little by little the young scholar thus made him- 
self master of the whole range of the science of his time: 
he became, as Burke rightly styled him, “ the father of 
English learning.” The tradition of the older classic 
culture was first revived for England in his quotations of 
Plato and Aristotle, of Seneca and Cicero, of Lucretius 
and Ovid. Virgilcast over him the same spell that he 
cast over Dante; verses from the Aineid break his nar- 
ratives of martyrdoms, and the disciple ventures on the 
track of the great master in a little eclogue descriptive 
of the approach of spring. His work was done with small 
aid from others. ‘* I am my own secretary,’ he writes; 
“TI make my own notes. J am my own librarian.” But 
forty-five works remained after his death to attest his 
prodigious industry. In his own eyes and those of his 
contemporaries the most important among these were the 
commentaries and homilies upon various books of the 
Bible which he had drawn from the writings of the 
Fathers. But he was far from confining himself to the- 
ology. In treatises compiled as text-hooks for his scholars 
Beda threw together all that the world had then accu- 
mulated in astronomy and meteorology, in physics and 
music, in philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, 
medicine. But the encyclopedic character of his re- 
searches left him in heart a simple Englishman. He 
loved his own English tongue, he was skilled in English 
song, his last work was a translation into English of the 
Gospel of St. John, and almost the last words that broke 
from his lips were some English rimes upon death. 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 63 


But the noblest proof of his love of England lies in the 
work which immortalizes his name. In his “ Ecclesias- 
tical History of the English Nation,” Beda was at once 
the founder of medieval history and the first English his- 
torian. All that we really know of the century and a 
half that follows the landing of Augustine we know from 
him. , Wherever his own personal observation extended, 
the story is told with admirable detail and force. He is 
hardly less full or accurate in the portions which he owed 
to his Kentish friends, Alewine and Nothelm. What he 
owed to no informant was his exquisite faculty of story- 
telling, and yet no story of his own telling is so touching 
as the story of his death. Two week before the Easter 
of 735 the old man was seized with an extreme weakness 
and loss of breath. He still preserved however his usual 
pleasantness and gay good-humor, and in spite of pro- 
longed sleeplessness continued his lectures to the pupils 
about him. Versesof his own English tongue broke from 
time to time from the master’s lip—rude rimes that told 
how before the * need-fare,” Death’s stern “ must go,” 
none can enough bethink hjm what is to be his doom for 
good orill. The tears of Beda’s scholars mingled with 
his song. ‘“ We never read without weeping,” writes one 
of them. So the days rolled on to Ascension-tide, and 
still master and pupils toiled at their work, for Beda 
longed to bring to an end his version of St. John’s Gospel 
into the English tongue and his extracts from Bishop 
Isidore. “I don’t want my boys to read a lie,” he an- 
swered those who would have had him rest, *“‘or to work 
to no purpose after I am gone.” A few days before 
Ascension-tide his sickness grew upon him, but he spent 
the whole day in teaching, only saying cheerfully to his 
scholars, “ Learn with what speed you may; I know not 
how long I may last.’”” ‘The dawn broke on another sleep- 
less night, and again the old man called his scholars round 
him arid bade them write. ‘There is still a chapter 
wanting,” said the scribe, as the morning drew on, “and 
it is hard for thee to question thyself any longer.” ‘It is 
easily done,’ said Beda; “take thy pen and write 
quickly.” Amid tears and farewells the day wore on to 


64 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


eventide. ‘“ There is yet one sentence unwritten, dear 
master,” said the boy. ‘ Write it quickly,’ bade the 
dying man. ‘It is finished now,” said the little seribeat 
last. ‘* You speak truth,” said the dying man; “all is 
finished now.” Placed upon the pavement, his head 
supported in his scholar’s arms, his faced turned to the 
spot where he was wont to pray, Beda chanted the sol- 
emn “ Glory to God” As his voice reached the close of 
his song he passed quietly away. 

First among English scholars, first among English theo- 
logians, first among English historians, it is in the monk 
of Jarrow that English literature. strikes its’ roots. In 
the six hundred scholars who gathered round him for in- 
struction he is the father of our national education. In 
his physical treatises he is the first figure to which our 
science looks back. But the quiet tenor of his scholar’s 
life was broken by the growing anarchy of Northumbria, 
and by threats of war from its Mercian rival. At last 
/Ethelbald marched on a state which seemed exhausted 
by civil discord and ready for submission to his arms. 
But: its king Eadberht showed himself worthy of the 
kings that had gone before him, and in 740 he threw 
back /Xthelbald’s attack in a repulse which not only 
ruined the Mercian ruler’s hopes of northern conquest 
but loosened his hold on the south. Already goaded to 
revolt by exactions, the West-Saxons were roused to a 
fresh struggle for independence, and after twelve years 
of continued outbreaks the whole people mustered at 
Burford under the golden dragon of their race. The 
fight was a desperate one, but a sudden panic seized the 
Mercian King. He fled from the field, and a decisive 
victory freed Wessex from the Mercian yoke. Four 
years later, in 757, its freedom was maintained by a new 
victory of Secandun; but amidst the rout of his host 
/Kthelbald redeemed the one hour of shame that had 
tarnished his glory; he refused to fly, and fell fighting 
on the field. 

But though Eadberht might beat back the inroads of 
the Mercians and even conquer Strathclyde, before the 
anarchy of his own kingdom he could only fling down 


EARLY ENGLAND.  449—1071. 65 


his sceptre and seek a refuge in the cloister of Lindis- 
farne. From the death of Beda the history of Northum- 
bria became in fact little more than a wild story of law- 
lessness and bloodshed. King after king was swept away 
by treason and revolt, the country fell into the hands of 
its turbulent nobles, its very fields lay waste, and the 
land was scourged by famine and plague. An anarchy 
almost as complete fell on Wessex after the recovery of 
its freedom. Only in Mid-England was there any sign 
of order and settled rule. The two crushing defeats at 
Burford and Secandun, though they had brought about 
revolts which stripped Mercia of all the conquests it had 
made, were far from having broken the Mercian power. — 
Under the long reign of Offa, which went on from 705 
to 796, it rose again to all but its old dominion. Since 
the dissolution of the temporary alliance which Penda 
formed with the Welsh King Cadwallon the war with 
the Britons in the west had been the one great hindrance 
to the progress of Mercia. But under Offa Mercia 
braced herseif to the completion of her British con- 
quests. Beating back the Welsh from Hereford, and 
carrying his own ravages into the heart of Wales, Offa 
in 779 drove the King of Powys from his capital, which 
changed its old name of Pengwern for the significant 
English title of the Town in the Scrub or Bush, Scrob- 
besbyryg, Shrewsbury. Experience however had taught 
the Mercians the worthlessness of raids like these and 
Offa resolved to create a military border by planting a 
settlement of Englishmen between the Severn, which had 
till then served as the western boundary of the English 
race, and the huge ‘“ Offa’s Dyke” which he drew from 
the mouth of Wye to that of Dee. Here, as in the later 
conquests of the West-Saxons, the old plan of extermina- 
tion was definitely abandoned and the Welsh who chose 
to remain dwelled undisturbed among their English con- 
querors. From these conquests over the Britons Offa 
turned to build up again the realm which had been shat- 
tered at Secandun. But his progress was slow. A re- 
conquest of Kent in 774 woke anew the jealousy of the 
West-Saxons ; and though Offa repulsed their attack at 


5 


66 ~—S«iHISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Bensington in 777 the victory was followed by several 
years of inaction. It was not till Wessex was again 
weakened by fresh anarchy that he was able to seize 
East Anglia and restore his realm to its old bounds under 
Wulfhere. Further he could not go. <A Kentish revolt - 
occupied him till his death in 796, and his successor 
Cenwulf did little but preserve the realm he bequeathed 
him. At the close of the eight century the drift of the 
English peoples towards a national unity was in fact 
utterly arrested. The work of Northumbria had been 
foiled by the resistance of Mercia; the effort of Mercia 
had broken down before the resistance of Wessex. A 
threefold division seemed to have stamped itself upon 
the land; and so complete was the balance of power be- 
tween the three realms which parted it that no subjec- 
tion of one to the other seemed likely to fuse the English 
tribes into an English people. 


CHAPTER III. 
WESSEX AND THE NORTHMEN, 
796-947. 


THE union which each English kingdom in turn had 
failed to bring about was brought about by the pressure 
of the Northmen. The dwellers in the isles of the Baltic 
or on either side of the Scandinavian peninsula had lain 
hidden till now from Western Christendom, waging their 
battle for existence with a stern climate, a barren soil, 
and stormy seas. It was this hard fight for life that left 
its stamp on the temper of Dane, Swede, or Norwegian 
alike, that gave them their defiant energy, their ruthless 
daring, their passion for freedom and hatred of settled 
rule. Forays and plunder raids over sea eked out their 
scanty livelihood, and at the close of the eighth century 
these raids found a wider sphere than the waters of the 
northern seas. Tidings of the wealth garnered in the 
abbeys and towns of the new Christendom which had 
risen from the wreck of Rome drew the pirates slowly 
southwards to the coasts of Northern Gaul ; and just be- 
fore Offa’s death their boats touched the shores of Brit- 
ain. To men of that day it must have seemed as though 
the world had gone back three hundred years. The 
same northern fiords poured forth their pirate-fleets as in 
the days of Hengest or Cerdic. There was the same 
wild panic as the black boats of the invaders struck 
inland along the river-reaches or moored round the river 
isles, the same sights of horror, firing of homesteads, 
slaughter of men, women driven off to slavery or shame, 


children tossed on pikes or sold in the market-place, as 
(67) 


68 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


when the English themselves had attacked Britain. 
Christian priests were again slain at the altar by wor- 
shippers of Woden; letters, arts, religion, government 
disappeared before these Northmen as before the North- 
men of three centuries before. 

In 794 a pirate band plundered the monasteries of Jar- 
row and Holy Island, and the presence of the freebooters 
soon told on the political balance of the English realms. 
A great revolution .was going on in the south, where 
Mercia was torn by civil wars which followed on Cen- 
wulf’s death while the civil strife of the West-Saxons 
was hushed by a new king, Ecgberht. In Offa’s days 
Ecgberht had failed in his claim of the crown of Wessex 
and had beén driven to fly for refuge to the court of the 
Franks. He remained there through the memorable year 
during which Charles the Great restored the Empire of 
the West, and returned in 802 to be quietly welcomed 
as King by the West-Saxon people. A march into the 
heart of Cornwall and the conquest of this last fragment 
of the British kingdom in the south-west freed his hands 
for a strife with Mercia which broke out in 825 when 
the Mercian King Beornwulf marched into the heart of 
Wiltshire. A victory of Ecgberht at Ellandun gave all 
England south of Thames to the West-Saxons and the 
defeat of Beornwulf spurred the men of East-Anglia to 
rise in a desperate revolt against Mercia. Two great 
overthrows at their hands had already spent its strength 
when Eceberht crossed the Thames in 827, and the realm 
of Penda and Offa bowed without a struggle to its con- 
queror. But Ecgberht had wider aims than those of 
supremacy over Mercia alone. ‘The dream of a union of 
all England drew him to the north. Northumbria was 
still strong; in learning and arts it stood at the head of 
the English race; and under a king lke Eadberht it 
would have withstood Ecgberht as resolutely as it had 
withstood Aithebald. But the ruin of Jarrow and Holy 
Island had cast on it a spell of terror. Torn by civil 
strife, and desperate of finding in itself the union needed 
to meet the Northmen, Northumbria sought union and 
deliverance in subjection to a foreign master. Its thegns 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 69 


met Ecgberht in Derbyshire, and owned the supremacy 
of Wessex. 

With the submission of Northumbria the work which 
Oswiu and A®thelbald has failed to do was done, and the 
whole English race was for the first time knit together 
under a single rule. The union came not a moment too 
soon. Had the old severance of people from people, the 
old civil strife within each separate realm gone on it is 
hard to see how the attacks of the Northmen could have 
been withstood. They were already settled in Ireland; 
and from Ireland a northern host landed in 836 at Char- 
mouth in Dorsetshire strong enough to drive Ecghberht, 
when he hastened to meet them, from the field. His 
victory the year after at Hengestdun won a little rest for 
the land; but Athelwulf who mounted the throne on 
Eegberht’s death in 839 had to face an attack which was 
only beaten off by years of hard fighting. Aithelwulf 
fought bravely in defence of his realm; in his defeat at 
Charmouth as in a final victory at Aclea in 851 he led his 
troops in person against the sea-robbers; and his success 
won peace for the land through the short and uneventful 
reigns of his sons Athelbald and Athelberht. But the 
northern storm burst in full force upon England when a 
third son, AXthelred, followed his brothers on the throne. 
The Northmen were now settled on the coast of Treland 
and the coast of Gaul; they were masters of the sea; and 
from west and east alike they closed upon Britain. While 
one host from Ireland fell on the Scot kingdom north 
of the Firth of Forth, another from Scandinavia landed 
in 866 on the coast of East Anglia under Hubba and 
marched the next year upon York. A victory over two 
claimants of its crown gave the pirates Northumbria ; 
and their two armies united at Nottingham in 868 for an 
attack on the Mercian realm. Mercia was saved by a 
march of King AEthelred to Nottingham, but the peace 
he made there with the Northmen left them leisure to 
prepare for an invasion of East-Anglia, whose under. 
King, Eadmund, brought prisoner before their leaders, 
was bound to a tree and shot to death with arrows. His 
martyrdom by the heathen made Eadmund the St. Sebas- 


70 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


tian of English legend ; in later days his figure gleamed 
from the pictured windows of every church along the 
eastern coast, and the stately Abbey of St. Edmunds- 
bury rose over his relics. With him ended the line 
of East-Anglian under-kings, for his kingdom was not 
only conquered but divided among the soldiers and the 
pirate host, and their leader Guthrum assumed its crown. 
Then the Northmen turned to the richer spoil of the 
great abbeys of the Fen. Peterborough, Crowland, 
Ely went up in flames,.and their monks fled or were slain 
among the ruins. Mercia, though still spared from actual 
conquest, cowered panic-stricken before the Northmen, 
and by payment of tribute owned them as its overlords. 

In five years the work of Ecgberht had been undone, 
and England north of the Thames-had been torn from the 
overlordship of Wessex. So rapid a change could only 
have been made possible by the temper of the conquered 
kingdoms. To them the conquest was simply their trans- 
fer from one overlord to another, and it may be that in 
all there were men who preferred the overlordship of the 
Northman to the overlordship of the West-Saxon. But 
the loss of the subject kingdoms left Wessex face to face 
with the invaders. The time had now come for it to fight, 
not for supremacy, but for life. As yet the land seemed 
paralyzed by terror. With the exception of his one 
march on Nottingham, King thelred had done nothing 
to save the under-kingdoms from the wreck. But the 
pirates no sooner pushed up Thames to Reading in 871 
than the West-Saxons, attacked on their own soil, turned 
fiercely at bay. A desperate attack drove the Northmen 
from Ashdown on the heights that overlooked the Vale 
of White Horse, but their camp in the tongue of land 
between the Kennet and Thames provell impregnable. 
fEthelred died in the midst of the struggle, and his 
brother Alfred, who now became king, bought the with- 
drawal of the pirates and afew years’ breathing-space 
for his realm. It was easy for the quick eye of Alfred 
to see that the Northmen had withdrawn simply with the 
view of gaining firmer footing for a new attack, three 
years indeed had hardly passed before Mercia was in- 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 71 


vaded and its under-King driven over sea to make place 
for a tributary of the invaders. From Repton half their 
host marched northwards to the Tyne, while Guthrum 
led the rest into his kingdom of East-Anglia to prepare 
for their next year’s attack on Wessex. In 876 his fleet 
appeared before Wareham, and when driven thence by 
Atlfred, the Northmen threw themselves into Exeter. 
Their presence there was likely to stir a rising of the 
Welsh, and through the winter Alfred girded himself 
for this new peril. At break of spring his army closed 
round the town, a hired fleet cruised off the coast to 
guard against rescue, and the defeat of their fellows at 
Wareham in an attempt to relieve them drove the pirates 
to surrender. They swore to leave Wessex and with- 
drew to Gloucester. But /#lfred had hardly disbanded 
his troops when his enemies, roused by the arrival of 
fresh hordes eager for plunder, reappeared at Chippen- 
ham, and in the opening of 878 marched ravaging over 
theland. ‘The surprise of Wessex was complete, and for 
a month or two the general panic left no hope of resist- 
ance. Atlfred, with his small band of followers, could 
only throw himself into a fort raised hastily in the isle of 
Athelney among the marshes of the Parret, a position 
from which he could watch closely the movements of his 
foes. But with the first burst of spring he called the thegns 
of Somerset to his standard, and still gathering troops as 
he moved marched through Wiltshire on the Northmen. 
He found their host at Edington, defeated it in a great 
battle, and after a siege of fourteen days forced them to 
surrender and to bind themselves by a solemn peace or 
“frith” at Wedmore in Somerset. In form the Peace 
of Wedmore seemed a surrender of the bulk of Britain 
to its invaders. All Northumbria, all East-Anglia, all 
Central England east of a line which stretched from 
Thames’ mouth along the Lea to Bedford, thence along 
the Ouse to Watling Street, and by Watling Street to 
Chester, was left subject to the Northmen. Throughout 
this ‘ Danelagh ’—as it was called—the conquerors set- 
tled down among the conquered population as lords of 
the soil, thickly in Northern Britain, more thinly. in its 


ie HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


central districts, but everywhere guarding jealously their 
old isolation and gathering in separate ‘ heres’ or armies 
round towns which were only linked in loose confedera- 
cies. The peace had in fact saved little more than 
Wessex itself. But in saving Wessex it saved England. 
The speli of terror was broken. The tide of invasion 
turned. From an attitude of attack the Northmen were 
thrown back on an attitude of defence. The whole reign 
of Ailfred was a preparation for a fresh struggle that was 
to wrest back from the pirates the land they had won. 
What really gave England heart for such a struggle 
was the courage and energy of the King himself. A#lfred 
was the noblest as he was the most complete embodi- 
ment of all that is great, all that is lovable, in the 
English temper. He combined as no other man has ever 
combined its practical energy, its patient and enduring 
force, its profound sense of duty, the reserve and self- 
control that steadies in it a wide outlook and a restless - 
daring, its temperance and fairness, its frank geniality, 
its sensitiveness to affection, its poetic tenderness, its 
deep and passionate religion. Religion indeed was the 
groundwork of Alfred’s character. His temper was in- 
stinct with piety. Everywhere throughout his writings 
that remain to us the name of God, the thought of God, 
stir him to outbursts of ecstatic adoration. But he was 
no mere saint. He felt none of that scorn of the world 
about him which drove the nobler souls of his day to 
monastery or hermitage. Vexed as he was by sickness 
and constant pain, his temper took no touch of asceticism. 
His rare geniality, a peculiar elasticity and mobility of 
nature, gave color and charm to his life. A sunny frank- 
ness and openness of spirit breathes in the pleasant chat 
of his books, and what he was in his books he showed 
himself in his daily converse. /Elfred was in truth an 
artist, and both the lights and shadows of his life were 
those of the artistic temperament. His love of books, 
his love of strangers, his questionings of travellers and 
scholars, betray an imaginative restlessness that longs to 
break out of the narrow world of experience which 
hemmed him in. At one time he jots down news of a 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 73 


voyage to the unknown seas of the north. At another he 
listens to tidings which his envoys bring back from the 
churches of Malabar. And side by side with this rest- 
less outlook of the artistic nature he showed its tender- 
ness and susceptibility, its vivid apprehension of unseen 
danger, its craving for affection, its sensitiveness to 
wrong. It was with himself rather than with his reader 
that he communed as thoughts of the foe without, of in- 
gratitude and opposition within, broke the calm pages of 
Gregory or Boethius. “ Oh, what a happy man was he,” 
he cries once, “ that man that had a naked sword hang- 
ing over his head from a single thread; so as to me it 
always did!” ‘Desirest thou power?” he asks at 
another time. “ But thou shalt never obtain it without’ 
sorrows—sorrows from strange folk, and yet keener sor- 
rows from thine own kindred.” ‘“ Hardship and sorrow!” 
he breaks out again, “not a king but would wish to be 
without these if he could. But 1 know that he cannot!” 
The loneliness which breathes in words like these has 
often begotten in great rulers a cynical contempt of men 
and the judgments of men. But cynicism found no echo 
in the large and sympathetic temper of Alfred. He not 
only longed for the love of his subjects, but for the re- 
membrance of “ generations ” to come. Nor did his inner 
gloom or anxiety check for an instant his vivid and 
versatile activity. To the scholars he gathered round 
him he seemed thevery type of ascholar, snatching every 
hour he could find to read or listen to books read to him. 
The singers of his court found in him a brother singer, 
gathering the old songs of his people to teach them to 
his children, breaking his renderings from the Latin with 
simple verse, solacing himself in hours of depression with 
the music of the Psalms. He passed from court and 
study to plan buildings and instruct craftsmen in gold- 
work, to teach even falconers and dog-keepers their busi- 
ness. But all this versatility and ingenuity was con- 
trolled by a cool good sense. /Elfred was a thorough 
man of business. He was careful of detail, laborious, 
methodical. He carried in his bosom a little handbook 
in which he noted things as they struck him—now a bit 


74 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


of family genealogy, now a prayer, now such a story as 
that of Ealdhelm playing minstrel on the bridge. Each 
hour of the day had its appointed task; there was the 
same order in the division of his revenue and in the ar- 
rangement of his court. 

Wide however and various as was the King’s temper, 
its range was less wonderful than its harmony. Of the 
narrowness, of the want of proportion, of the predomi- 
nance of one quality over another which goes commonly 
with an intensity of moral purpose A‘lfred showed not a 
trace. Scholar and soldier, artist and man of business, 
poet and saint, his character kept that perfect balance 
which charms us in no other Englishman save Shakspere. 
But full and harmonious as his temper was, it was the 
temper of aking. Every power was bent to the work 
of rule. His practical energy found scope for itself in 
the material and administrative restoration of the wasted 
land. His intellectual activity breathed fresh life into 
education and literature. His capacity for inspiring trust 
and affection drew the hearts of Englishmen to a common 
centre, and began the upbuilding of a new England. 
And all was guided, controlled, ennobled by a single 
aim. ‘So long as I have lived,” said the King as life 
closed about him, “I have striven to live worthily.” 
Little by little men came to know what such a life of 
worthiness meant. Little by little they came to recog- 
nize in Adlfred a ruler of higher and nobler stamp than 
the world had seen.. Never had it seen a King who lived 
solely for the good of his people. Never had it seen a 
ruler who set aside every personal aim to devote himself 
solely to the welfare of those whom he ruled. It was 
this grand self-mastery that gave him his power over the 
men about him. Warriorand conqueror as he was, they 
saw him set aside at thirty the warrior’s dream of con- 
quest; and the self-renouncement of Wedmore struck 
the key-note of his reign. But still more is it this height 
and singleness of purpose, this absolute concentration of 
the noblest faculties to the noblest aim, that lifts Ailfred 
out of the narrow bounds of Wessex. If the sphere of 
his action seems too small to justify the comparison of 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 7) 


him with the few whom the world owns as its greatest 
men, he rises to their level in the moral grandeur of his 
life. And it is this which has hallowed his memory 
among his own English people. ‘I desire,” said the 
King in some of his latest words, “I desire to leave to 
the men that come after me a remembrance of me in good 
works.” His aim has been more than fulfilled. His 
memory has come down to us with a living distinctness 
through the mists of exaggeration and legend which time 
gathered round it. The instinct of the people has clung 
to him with a singular affection. The love which he 
won a thousand years ago has lingered round his name 
from that day to this. While every other name of those 
earlier times has all but faded from the recollection of 
Englishmen, that of Alfred remains familiar to every 
English child. 

The secret of Alfred’s government lay in his own 
vivid energy. He could hardly have chosen braver or 
more active helpers than those whom he employed both 
in his political and in his educational efforts. The chil- 
dren whom he trained to rule proved the ablest rulers of 
their time. But at the outset of his reign he stood alone, 
and what work was to be done was done by the King 
himself. His first efforts were directed to the material 
restoration of his realm. The burnt and wasted country 
saw its towns built again, forts erected in positions of 
danger, new abbeys founded, the machinery of justice 
and government restored, the laws codified and amended. 
Still more strenuous were /£lfred’s efforts for its moral 
and intellectual restoration. Even in Mercia and North- 
umbria the pirates’ sword had left few survivors of the 
schools of Ecgberht or Beda, and matters were even 
worse in Wessex which had been as yet the most igno- 
rant of the English kingdoms. ‘ When I began to reign,” 
said Ailfred, “I cannot remember one priest south of 
the Thames who could render his service-book into Eng- 
lish.” For instructors indeed he could find only a few 
Mercian prelates and priests with one Welsh bishop, 
Asser. ‘¢ Formerly,” the king writes bitterly, ‘“‘men came 
hither from foreign lands to seek for instruction, and now 


76 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


when we desire it we can only obtain it from abroad.” 
But his mind was far from being prisoned within his own 
island. He sent a Norwegian ship-master to explore the 
White Sea, and Wulfstan to trace the coast of Esthonia ; 
envoys bore his presents to the churches of India and 
Jerusalem, and an annual mission carried Peter’s-pence 
to Rome. But it was with the Franks that his inter- 
course was closest, and it was from them that he drew 
the scholars to aid him in his work of education. A 
scholar named Grimbald came from St. Omer to preside 
over his new abbey at Winchester; and John, the old 
Saxon, was fetched from the abbey of Corbey to rule a 
monastery and school that /‘lfred’s gratitude for his de- 
liverance from the Danes raised in the marshes of Athel- 
ney. The real work however to be done was done, not 
by these teachers but by the King himself. Atlfred estab- 
lished a school for the young nobles in his court, and it 
was to the need of books for these scholars in their own 
tongue that we owe his most remarkable literary effort. 
He took his books as he found them—they were the pop- 
ular manuals of his age—the Consolation of Boethius, 
the Pastoral of Pope Gregory, the compilation of Orosius, 
then the one accessible hand-book of universal history, 
and the history of his own people by Beda. He trans- 
lated these works into English, but he was far more than 
a translator, he was an editor for the people. Here he 
omitted, there he expanded. He enriched Orosius by a 
sketch of the new geographical discoveries in the North. 
He gave a West-Saxon form to his selections from Beda. 
In one place he stops to explain his theory of govern- 
ment, his wish for a thicker population, his conception 
of national welfare as consisting in a due balance of 
priest, soldier, and churl. The mention of Nero spurs 
him to an outbreak on the abuses of power. The cold 
Providence of Boethius gives way to an enthusiastic ac- 
knowledgment of the goodness of God. As he writes, 
his large-hearted nature flings off its royal mantle, and he 
talks asa man to men. ‘Do not blame me,’ he prays 
with a charming simplicity, “if any know Latin better 
than I, for every man must say what he says and do 


~ 


EARLY ENGLAND, 449—1071. rhs 


what he does according to his ability.” But simple as 
was his aim, A¢]fred changed the whole front of our liter- 
ature. Before him, England possessed in her own tongue 
one great poem and a train of ballads and battle-songs. 
Prose she had none. The mighty roll of prose books 
that fill her libraries begins with the translations of 
AElfred, and above all with the chronicle of his reign. 
It seems likely that the King’s rendering of Beda’s his- 
tory gave the first impulse towards the compilation of 
what is known as the English or Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 
which was certainly thrown into its present form during 
his reign. The meagre list of the Kings of Wessex and _ 
the bishops of Winchester, which had been preserved 
from older times, were roughly expanded into a national 
history by insertions from Beda: but it is when it 
reaches the reign of /lfred that the chronicle suddenly 
widens into the vigorous narrative, full of life and orig- 
inality, that marks the gift of a new power to the Eng- 
lish tongue. Varying as it does from age to age in his- 
toric value, it remains the first vernacular history of any 
Teutonic people, and save for the Gothic translations of 
Ulfilas, the earliest and most venerable monument of 
Teutonic prose. 

But all this literary activity was only a part of that 
general upbuilding of Wessex by which A‘lfred was pre- 
paring for the fresh contest with the stranger. Heknew 
that the actual winning back of the Danelagh must be a 
work of the sword, and through these long years of peace 
he was busy with the creation of such a force as might 
match that of the Northmen. A fleet grew out of the 
little squadron which A‘lfred had been forced to man 
with Frisian seamen. The national fyrd or levy of all 
freemen at the King’s call was reorganized. It was now 
divided into two halves, one of which served in the field 
while the other guarded.its own burhs: and townships 
and served to relieve its fellow when the men’s forty days 
of service was ended. A more disciplined military force 
was provided by subjecting all owners of five hides of 
land to thegn-service, a step which recognized the change 
that had now substituted the thegn for the eorl and in 


78 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


which we see the beginning of a feudal system. How 
effective these measures were was seen when the new 
resistance they met on the Continent drove the North- 
men to a fresh attack on Britain. In 893 a large fleet 
steered for the Andredsweald, while the sea-king Hasting 
entered the Thames. /lfred held both at bay through 
the year till the men of the Danelagh rose at their com- 
rades’ call. Wessex stood again front to front with the 
Northmen. But the King’s measures had made the 
realm strong enough to set asideits old policy of defence 
for one of vigorous attack. His son Eadward and his son- 
in-law AXthelred, whom he had set as Ealdorman over 
what remained of Mercia, showed themselves as skilful 
and active as the King. The aim of the Northmen was 
to rouse again the hostility of the Welsh, but while 
fElfred held Exeter against their fleet Edward and 
fEthelred caught their army near the Severn and over- 
threw it with a vast slaughter at Buttington. The de- 
struction of their camp on the Lea by the united English 
forces ended the war; in 897 Hasting again withdrew 
across the Channel, and the Danelagh made peace. It 
was with the peace he had won still about him that 
/Elfred died in 901, and warrior as his son Edward had 
shown himself, he clung to his father’s policy of rest. 
It was not till 910 that a fresh rising of the Northmen 
forced AElfred’s children to gird themselves to the con- 
quest of the Danelagh. 

While Eadward bridled East-Anglia his sister Aithel- 
fled, in whose hands thelred’s death left English 
Mercia, attacked the * Five Boroughs,” arude confederacy 
which had taken the piace of the older Mercian kingdom. 
Derby represented the original Mercia on the upper 
Trent, Lincoln the Lindiswaras, Leicester the Middle- 
English, Stamford the province of the Gyrwas, Notting- 
ham probably that of the Southumbrians. Each of these 
‘Five Boroughs ” seems to have been ruled by its earl 
with his separate “ host; ” within each twelve “ lawmen ” 
administered Danish law, while a common justice-court 
existed for the whole confederacy. In her attack upon this 
powerful league AXthelfled abandoned the older strategy 


BARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 19 


of battle and raid for that of siege and fortress-building. 
Advancing along the line of Trent, she fortified Tamworth 
and Stafford on its head-waters ; when a rising in Gwent 
called her back to the Welsh border, her army stormed 
Brecknock; and its king no sooner fled for shelter to the 
Northmen in whose aid he had risen than /Ethelfled at 
once closed on Derby. Raids from Middle-England failed 
to draw the Lady of Mercia from her prey; and Derby 
was hardly her own when, turning southward, she forced 
the surrender of Leicester. The brilliancy of his sister’s 
exploits had as yet eclipsed those of the King, but the son 
of Elfred was a vigorous and active ruler; he had re- 
pulsed a dangerous inroad of the Northmen from France, 
summoned no doubt by the cry of distress from their 
brethren in England, and had bridled East-Anglia to the 
south by the erec’ion of forts at Hertford and Witham. 
On the death of AXthelfled in 918 he came boldly to the 
front. Annexing Mercia to Wessex, and thus gathering 
the whole strength of the kingdom into his single hand. 
he undertook the systematic reduction of the Danelagh. 
South of the Middle-English and the Fens lay a tract 
watered by the Ouse and the Nen—originally the dis- 
trict of the tribe known as the South-English, and now, 
like the Five Boroughs of the north, grouped around the 
towns of Bedford, Huntingdon, and Northampton. The 
reduction of these was followed by that of East-Anglia ; 
the Northmen of the Fens submitted with Stamford, the 
Southumbrians with Nottingham. Edward’s Mercian 
troops had already seized Manchester; he himself was 
preparing to complete his conquest, when in 924 the 
whole of the North suddenly laid itself at his feet. Not 
merely Northumbria but the Scots and the Britons of 
Strathclyde “ chose him to father and lord.” 

The triumph was his last. Eadward died in 925, but 
the reign of his son /Ethelstan, AZlfred’s golden-haired 
grandson whom the King had girded as a child with a 
sword set in a golden scabbard and a gem-studded belt, 
proved even more glorious than his own. In spite of its 
submission the North had still to be won. Dread of the 
Northmen had drawn Scot and Cumbrian to their ac- 


80 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


knowledgment of Eadward’s overlordship, but A¢thel- 
stan no sooner incorporated Northumbria with his do- 
minions than dread of Wessex took the place of dread 
of the Danelagh. The Scot King Constantine organized 
a league of Scot, Cumbrian, and Welshman with the 
Northmen. Theleague was broken by A“thelstan’s rapid 
action in 926; the North-Welsh were foreed to pay an- 
nual tribute, to march in his armies, and to attend his 
councils; the West-Welsh of Cornwall were reduced to 
a like vassalage, and finally driven from Exeter, which 


they had shared till then with its English inhabitants. — 


But ten years later the same league called A‘thelstan 
again to the North; and though Constantine was pun- 
ished by an army which wasted his kingdom while a fleet 
ravaged its coasts to Caithness the English army had no 
sooner withdrawn than Northumbria rose in 987 at the 
appearance of a fleet of pirates from Ireland under the 
sea-king Anlaf in the Humber. Scot and Cumbrian 
fought beside the Northmen against the West-Saxon 
King; but his victory at Brunanburh crushed the con- 
federacy and won peace till his death. His son Ead- 
mund was but a boy at his accession in 940, and the 
North again rose in revolt. The men of the Five 
Boroughs joined their kinsmen in Northumbria; once 
Eadmund was driven to a peace which left him King but 
south of the Watling Street; and only years of hard 
fighting again laid the Danelagh at his feet. 

But policy was now to supplement the work of the 
sword. ‘The completion of the West-Saxon realm was 
in fact reserved for the hands, not of a king or warrior, 
but of a priest. Dunstan stands first in the line of eccle- 
siastical statesmen who counted among them Lanfranc 
and Wolsey and ended in Laud. He is still more re- 
markable in himself, in his own vivid personality after 
eight centuries of revolution and change. He was born 
in the little hamlet of Glastonbury, the home of his father, 
Heorstan, a man of wealth and brother of the bishops of 
Wells and of Winchester. It must have been in his 
father’s hall that the fair, diminutive boy, with his scant 
but beautiful hair, caught his love for “the vain songs 


a 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1701. 81 


- of heathendom, the trifling legends, the funeral chaunts,” 
which afterwards roused against him the charge of sorcery. 
Thence too he might have derived his passionate love of 
music, and his custom of carrying his harp in hand on 
journey or visit. Wandering scholars of Ireland had 
left their books in the monastery of Glastonbury, as they 
left them along the Rhine andthe Danube; and Dunstan 
plunged into the study of sacred and profane letters till 
his brain broke down in delirium. So famous became his 
knowledge in the neighborhood that news of it reached 
the court of Athelstan, but his appearance there was the 
signal for a burst of ill-will among the courtiers. They 
drove him from the king’s train, threw him from his 
horse as he passed through the marshes, and with the 
wild passion of their age trampled him under foot in the 
mire. The outrage ended in fever, and Dunstan rose from 
his sick-bed a monk. But the monastic profession was 
then a little more than a vow of celibacy and his devotion 
took no ascetic turn. His nature in fact was sunny, ver- 
satile, artistic; full of strong affections, and capable of 
inspiring others with affections as strong. Quick-witted, 
of tenacious memory, a ready and fluent speaker, gay 
and genial in address, an artist, a musician, he was at 
the same time an indefatigable worker at books, at build- 
ing, at handicraft. As his sphere began to widen we see 
him followed by a train of pupils, busy with literature, 
writing, harping, painting, designing. One morning a 
lady summons him to her house to design a robe which 
she is embroidering, and as he bends with her maidens 
over their toil his harp hung upon the wall sounds with- 
out mortal touch tones which the excited ears around 
frame into a joyous antiphon. 

From this scholar-life Dunstan was called to a wider 
sphere of activity by the accession of Eadmund. But the 
old jealousies revived at his reappearance at court, and 
counting the game lost Dunstan prepared again to with- 
draw. The King had spent the day in the chase; the 
red deer which he was pursuing dashed over Cheddar 
cliffs, and his horse only checked itself on the brink of 
the ravine at the moment when Eadmund in the bitterness 


82 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


of death was repenting of his injustice to Dunstan. He 
was at once summoned on the King’s return. ‘Saddle 
your horse,” said Eadmund, “and ride with me.” The 
royal train swept over the marshes to his home; and the 
King, bestowing on him the kiss of peace, seated him in 
the abbot’s chair as Abbot of Glastonbury.. Dunstan be- 
came one of Edmund’s councillors and his hand was seen ~ 
in the settlement of the North. It was the hostility of 
the states around it to the West-Saxon rule which had 
roused so often revolt in the Danelagh; but from this 
time we hear nothing more of the hostility of Bernicia, 
while Strathclyde was conquered by Eadmund and 
turned adroitly to account in winning over the Scots to 
his cause. The greater part of it was granted to their 
King Malcolm on terms that he should be Eadmunds 
fellow-worker by sea and land. The league of Scot and 
Briton was thus finally broken up, and the fidelity of 
the Scots secured by their need of help in holding down 
their former ally. The settlement was soon troubled by 
the young King’s death. As he feasted at Pucklechurch 
in the May of 946, Leofa, a robber whom Eadmund had 
banished from the land, entered the hall, seated himself 
at the royal board, and drew sword on the cup-bearer 
when he bade hin retire. The King sprang in wrath to 
his thegn’s aid, and seizing Leofa by the hair, flung him 
to the ground; but in the strugyvle the robber drove his 
dagger to Eadmund’s heart. His death at once stirred 
fresh troubles in the North; the Danelagh rose against 
his brother and successor, Eadred, and some years of 
hard fighting were needed before it was again driven to 
own the English supremacy. But with its submission 
in 954 the work of conquest was done. Dogged as his 
fight had been, the Northman at last owned himself 
beaten. From the moment of Eadred’s final triumph all 
resistance came to an end. The Danelagh ceased to be 
a force in English politics. North might part anew from 
South; men of Yorkshire might again cross swords with 
men of Hampshire; but their strife was henceforth a 
local strife between men of the same people; it was a 
strife of Englishmen with Englishmen, and not of Eng- 
lishmen with Northmen. 


CHAPTER IV. 
FEUDALISM AND THE MONARCHY. 
954—1071. 


THE fierceness of the Northman’s onset had hidden the 
real character of his attack. To the men who first fronted 
the pirates it seemed as though the story of the world had 
gone back to the days when the German barbarians first 
broke in upon the civilized world. It wasso above all in 
Britain. Al! that tradition told of the Englishmen’sown 
attack on the island was seen in the Northmen’s attack 
on it. Boats of marauders from the northern seas again 
swarmed off the British coast; church and town were 
again the special object of attack; the invaders again 
settled on the conquered soil ; heathendom again proved 
stronger than the faith of Christ. But the issues of the 
two attacks showed the mighty difference between them. 
When the English ceased from their onset upon Roman 
Britain Roman Britain had disappeared, and a new peo- 
ple of conquerors stood alone on the conquered land. 
The Northern storm on the other hand left land, people, 
government unchanged. England remained a country of 
Englishmen. The conquerors sank into the mass of the 
conquered, and Woden yielded without a struggle to 
Christ. The strife between Briton and Englishman was 
in fact a strife between men of different races, while the 
strife between Northman and Englishman was a strife 
between men whose race was the same. The followers 
of Hengest or of Ida were men utterly alien from the life 
of Britain, strange to its arts, its culture, its wealth, as 
they were strange to the social degradation which Fome 


had brought on its province. But the Northman was 
(83) 


84 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


little more than an Englishman bringing back to an Eng- 
land which had drifted far from its origin the barbaric 
life of its earliest forefathers. Nowhere throughout 
Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere else were 
the fighters men of one blood and one speech. But just 
for this reason the union of the combatants was nowhere 
so peaceful or so complete. The victory of the house of 
/Elfred only hastened a process of fusion. which was al- 
ready going on. From the first moment of his settlement 
in the Danelagh the Northman had been passing into an 
Englishman. The settlers were few; they were scattered 
among.a large population ; in tongue, in manner, in in- 
stitutions there was little to distinguish them from the 
men among whom they dwelt. Moreover their national 
temper helped on the process of assimilation. Even in 
France, where difference of language and difference of 
custom seemed to interpose an impassable barrier be- 
tween the Northman settled in Normandy and his neigh- 
bors, he was fast becoming a Freuchman. In England, 
where no such barriers existed, the assimilation was even 
quicker. The two peoples soon became confounded. In 
a few years a Northman in blood was Archbishop of 
Canterbury and another Northman in blood was Arch- 
bishop of York. 

The fusion might have been delayed if not wholly 
averted by continued descents from the Scandinavian 
homeland. But with Eadred’s reign the long attack 
which the Northman had directed against western 
Christendom came, for a while at least, to an end. On 
the world which it assailed its results had been immense. 
It had utterly changed the face of the west. The empire 
of Ecgberht, the empire of Charles the Great, had been 
alike dashed to pieces. But break and change as it might, 
Christendom had held the Northmen at bay. The Scan- 
dinavian power which had grown up on the western seas 
had disappeared like a dream. In Ireland the North- 
man’s rule had dwindled to the holding of a few coast 
towns. In France his settlements had shrunk to the one 
settlement of Normandy. In England every Northman 
was a subject of the English King. Even the Empire 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 85 


of the Seas had passed from the Sea-King’s hands. It 
was an English and not a Scandinavian fleet that for 
fifty years to come held mastery in the English and the 
Trish Channels. With Eadred’s victory in fact the strug- 
gle seemed to have reached its close. Stray pirate boats 
still hung off headland and coast; stray vikings still 
shoved out in spring-tide to gather booty. Butfor nearly 
half a century to come no great pirate fleet made its way 
to the west, or landed on the shores of Britain. The 
energies of the Northmen were in fact absorbed through 
these years in the political changes ef Scandinavia itself. 
The old isolation of fiord from fiord and dale from dale 
was breaking down. The little commonwealths which had 
held so jealously aloof from each other were being drawn 
together whether they would or no. In each of the three 
regions of the north great kingdoms were growing up. In 
Sweden King Eric made himself lord of the petty states 
about him. In Denmark King Gorm built up in the same 
way a monarchy of the Danes. Norway, though it lin- 
gered long, followed at last in the same track. Legend 
told how one of its many rulers, Harald of Westfold, sent 
his men to bring him Gytha of Hordaland, a girl he had 
chosen for wife, and how Gytha sent his men back again 
with taunts at his petty realm. The taunts went home, 
and Harald vowed never to clip or comb his hair till he 
had made all Norway his own. Soevery springtide came 
war and hosting, harrying and burning, till a great fight 
at Hafursfiord settled the matter, and Harald “ Ugly- 
Head” as men called him while the strife lasted was free 
to shear his locks again and became Harald “ Fair-Hair.” 
The Northmen loved no master, and a great multitude 
fled out of the country, some pushing as far as Iceland 
and colonizing it, some swarming to the Orkneys and 
Hebrides till Harald harried them out again and the sea- 
kings sailed southward to join Guthrum’s host in the 
Rhine country or follow Rolf to his fights on the Seine. 
But little by little the land settled down into order, and 
the three Scandinavian realms gathered strength for new 
efforts which were to leave their mark on our after history. 

But of thenew danger which threatened it in this union 


86 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


of the north England knew little. The storm seeméd to 
have drifted utterly away; and the land passed from a 
hundred years of ceaseless conflict into a time of peace. 
Here as elsewhere the Northman had failed in his pur- 
pose of conquest ; but here as elsewhere he had done a 
mighty work. In shattering the empire of Charles the 
Great he had given birth to the nations of modern 
Europe. In his long strife with Englishmen he had 
created an English people. The national union which 
had been brought about for a moment by the sword of 
Eegberht was a union of sheer force which broke down 
at the first blow of the sea-robbers. The black boats of 
the Northmen were so many wedges that split up the 
fabric of the roughly-built realm. But the very agency 
which destroyed the new England was destined to bring 
it back again, and to breathe into it a life that made its 
union real. The peoples who had so long looked on each 
other as enemies found themselves fronted by a common 
foe. ‘They were thrown together by a common danger 
and the need of a commondefence. Their common faith 
grew into a national bond as religion struggled hand in 
hand with England itself against the heathen of the north. 
They recognized a common king as a common struggle 
changed Alfred and his sons from mere leaders of West 
Saxons into the leaders of all Englishmen in their ficht 
with the stranger. And when the work which Alfred 
set his house to do was done, when the yoke of the 
Northman was lifted from the last of his conquests, Engle 
and Saxon, Northumbrian and Mercian, spent with the 
battle for a common freedom and a common country, 
knew themselves in the hour of their deliverance as an 
English people. 

The new people found its centre in the King. The 
heightening of the royal power was a direct outcome 
of the war. The dying out of other royal stocks left 
the house of Cerdic the one line of hereditary kingship. 
But it was the war with the Northmen that raised A¢lfred 
and his sons from tribal leaders into national kings. 
The loug series of triumphs which wrested the land from 
the stranger begot a new and universal loyalty ; while the 


EARLY ENGLAND, 449—1071. 87 


wider dominion which their success bequeathed removed 
the kings further and further from their people, lifted 
them higher and higher above the nobles, and clothed 
them more and more with a mysterious dignity. Above 
all the religious character of the war against the North- 
men gave a religious character to the sovereigns who 
waged it. The king, if he was no longer sacred as the 
son of Woden, became yet more sacred as “the Lord’s 
Anointed.” By the very fact of his consecration he was 
pledged to religious rule, to justice, mercy, and good 
government ; buthis “ hallowing” invested him also with 
a power drawn not from the will of man or the assent 
of his subjects but from the will of God, and treason 
against him became the worst of crimes. Every reign 
lifted the sovereign higher in the social scale. The bishop, 
once ranked equal with him in value of life, sank to the 
level of the ealdorman. The ealdorman himself, once the 
hereditary ruler of a smaller state, became a mere delegate 
of the national king, with an authority curtailed in every 
shire by that of the royal shire-reeves, cfficers despatched 
to levy the royal revenues and to administer ihe royal 
justice. Among the later nobility of the thegns personal 
service with such a lord was held not to degrade but to en- 
noble. “ Dish-thegn” and “ bower-theen,” ‘ house-thegn” 
and “horse-thegn’”’ found themselves great officers of 
state; and development of politics, the wider extension of 
home and foreign affairs were already transforming these 
royal officers into a standing council or ministry for the 
transaction of the ordinary administrative business and the 
reception of judicial appeals. Such a ministry, composed of 
thegns or prelates nominated by the King, and constitut- 
ing in itself a large part of the Witenagemote when that 
assembly was gathered for legislative purposes, drew the 
actual control of affairs more and more into the hands of 
the sovereign himself. 

But the king’s power was still a personal power. He 
had to be everywhere and see for himself that everything 
he willed was done. The royal claims lay still far ahead 
of the real strength of the Crown. There was a want of 
administrative machinery in actual connexion with the 


88 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


government, responsible to it. drawing its force directly 
from it, and working automatically in its name even 
in moments when the royal power was itself weak or 
wavering. The Crown was strong under a king who 
was strong, whose personal action was felt everywhere 
throughout the realm, whose dread lay on every reeve 
and ealdorman. But with a weak king the Crown was 
weak. Ealdormen, provincial witanagemotes, local 
jurisdictions, ceased to. move at the royal bidding the 
moment the direct royal pressure was loosened or re- 
moved. Enfeebled as they were, the old provincial 
jealousies, the old tendency to severance and isolation 
lingered on and woke afresh when the Crown fell to a 
nerveless ruler or toa child. And at the moment we 
have reached the royal power and the national union 
it embodied had to battle with fresh tendencies towards 
national disintegration which sprang like itself from the 
struggle with the Northman. The tendency towards per- 
sonal dependence and towards a social organization based 
on personal dependence received an overpowering im- 
pulse from the strife. The long insecurity of a century of 
warfare drove the ceorl, the free tiller of the soil, toseek 
protection more and more from the thegn beside him, The 
freeman “ commended” himself to a lord who promised 
aid, and as the price of this shelter he surrendered his free- 
hold to receive it back as a fief laden with conditions of 
military service. Theprinciple of personal allegiance 
which was embodied in the very notion of thegnhood, it- 
selftended to widen intoa theory of general dependence. 
From /Elfred’s day it was assumed that no man could exist 
without a lord. The “lordless man” became a sort of 
outlaw in the realm. The free man, the very base of the 
older English constitution, died down more and more into 
the “villein,” the man who did suit and service to a 
master, who followed him to the field, who looked to his 
court for justice, who rendered days of service in his 
demesne. The same tendencies drew the lesser thegns 
around the greater nobles, and these around the provin- 
cial ealdormen. The ealdormen had hardly been dwarfed 
into lieutenants of the national sovereign before they 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 89 


again began to rise into petty kings, and in the century 
which follows we see Mercian or Northumbrian thegns 
following a Mercian or Northumbrian ealdorman to the 
field though it were against the lord of the land. Even 
the constitutional forms which sprang from the old Eng- 
lish freedom tended to invest the higher nobles with a 
commanding power. In the “ great meeting” of the Wit- 
enagemote or Assembly of the Wise lay the rule of the 
realm. It represented the whole English people, as the 
wise-moots of each kingdom represented the separate peo- - 
ples of each ; and its powers were as supreme in the wider 
field as theirs in the narrower. It could elect or depose 
the King. To it belonged the higher justice, the imposi- 
tion of taxes, the making of laws, the conclusion of trea- 
ties, the control of wars, the disposal of public lands, the 
appointment of great officers of state. But such a meet- 
ing necessarily differed greatly in constitution from the 
Witans of the lesser kingdoms. The individual freeman, 
save when the host was gathered together, could hardly 
take part in its deliberations. The only relic of its pop- 
ular character lay at last in the ring of citizens who 
gathered round the Wise Men at London or Winchester, 
and shouted their “aye” or “nay” at the election of a 
king. Distance and the hardship of travel made the 
presence of the lesser thegns as rare as that of the free- 
men; and the national council practically shrank into a 
gathering of the ealdormen, the bishops, and the officers 
of the crown. 

The old English democracy had thus all but passed 
into an oligarchy of the narrowest kind. The feudal 
movement which in other lands was breaking up every 
nation into a mass of loosely-knit states with nobles at 
their head who owned little save a nominal allegiance to 
their king threatened to break up England itself. What 
hindered its triumph was the power of the Crown, and it 
is the story of this struggle between the monarchy and 
these tendencies to feudal isolation which fills the period 
between the death of Eadred and the conquest of the 
Norman. It was a struggle which England shared with 
the rest of the western world, but its issue here was a 


90 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


peculiar one. In other countries feudalism won an easy 
victory over the central government. In England alone 
the monarchy was strong enough to hold feudalism at bay. 
Powerful as he might be, the English ealdorman never 
succeeded in becoming really hereditary or independent 
of the Crown. Kings as weak as A‘thelred could drive 
ealdormen into exile and could replace them by fresh 
nominees. Ifthe Witenagemote enabled the great nobles 
to bring their power to bear directly on the Crown, it 
- preserved at any ratea feeling of national unity and was 
forced to back the Crown against individual. revolt. 
The Church too never became feudalized. The bishop 
elung to the Crown, and the bishop remained a great so- 
cial and political power. As local in area as the ealdor- 
man, for the province was his diocese and he sat by his 
side in the local Witenagemote, he furnished a standing 
check on the independence of the great nobles. But if 
feudalism proved too weak to conquer the monarchy, it 
was strong enough to paralyze its action. Neither of the 
two forces could master the other, but each could weaken 
the other, and throughout the whole period of their con- 
flict England lay a prey to disorder within and to insult 
from without. 7 

The first sign of these troubles was seen when. the 
death of Eadred in 955 handed over the realm toa child 
King, his nephew Eadwig. Eadwig was swayed by a 
woman of high lineage, Aithelgifu; and the quarrel 
between her and the older counsellors of Eadred broke 
into open strife at the coronation feast. On the young 
King’s insolent withdrawal to her chamber Dunstan, 
at the bidding of the Witan, drew him roughly back 
to his seat. But the feast was no sooner ended than a 
sentence of outlawry drove the abbot over sea, while the 
triumph of Acthelgifu was crowned in 957 by the marriage 
of her daughter to the King and the spohation of the 
monasteries which Dunstan had befriended. As the new 
Queen was Eadwig’s kinswoman the religious opinion of 
the day regarded his marriage as incestuous, and it was 
followed by a revolution. At the opening of 958 Arch- 
bishop Odo parted the King from his wife by solemn 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 91 


sentence; while the Mercians and Northumbrians rose in 
revolt, proclaimed Hadwig’s brother Eadgar their king, 
and recalled Dunstan. The deathof Eadwig a few months 
later restored the unity of the realm; but his successor 
Eadgar was only a boy of fourteen and throughont. his 
reign the actual direction of affairs layin the hands of 
Dunstan, whose elevation to the see of Canterbury set him 
at the head of.the Church as of the State. The noblest 
tribute to his rule lies in the silence of our chroniclers. 
His work indeed was a work of settlement, and such a 
work was best done by the simple enforcement of peace. 
During the years of rest in which the stern hand of the 
Primate enforced justice and order Northman and English- 
man drew together intoasingle people. Theirunion was 
the result of no direct policy of fusion; on the contrary 
Dunstan’s policy preserved to the conquered Danelagh 
its local rights and local usages. But he recognized 
the men of the Danelagh as Englishmen, he employed 
Northmen in the royal service, and promoted them to 
high posts in Church and State. For the rest he trusted 
to time, and time justified his trust. The fusion was 
marked by a memorable change in the name of the 
land. Slowly as the conquering tribes had learned to 
know themselves by the one national name of English- 
men, they learned yet more slowly to stamp their name 
on the land they had won. It was not till Eadgav’s 
day that the name of Britain passed into the name. of 
Engla-land, the land of Englishmen, England. Thesame 
vigorous rule ‘which secured rest for the country during 
these years of national union told on the growth of material 
prosperity. Commerce sprang into a wider life. Its 
extension is: seen in the complaint that men learned 
fierceness from the Saxon of Germany, effeminacy from 
the Fleming, and drunkenness from the Dane. The laws 
of Aithelred which provide for the protection and regu- 
lation of foreign trade only recognize a state of things 
which grew up under Eadgar. ‘“ Men of the Empire,” 
traders of Lower Lorraine and the Rhine-land, ‘ Men of 
Rouen,” traders from the new Norman duchy of the Seine, 
were seen in the streets of London. It was in Eadgar’s 


92 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


day indeed that London rose to the commercial greatness 
it has held ever since. 

Though Eadgar reigned for sixteen years, he was still 
in the prime of manhood when he died in 975. His 
death gave a fresh opening to the great nobles. He had 
bequeathed the Crown to his elderson Eadward; but the 
Ealdorman of East Anglia, Aithelwine, rose at once to set 
a younger child, A‘thelred, on the throne. But the two 
primates of Canterbury and York who had joined in setting 
the crown on the head of Eadgar now joined in setting 
it on the head of Eadward, and Dunstan remained as 
before master of the realm. ‘The boy’s reign however was 
troubled by strife between the monastic party and their — 
opponents till in 979 the quarrel was cut short by his 
murder at Corfe, and with the accession of AZthelred, the 
power of Dunstan made way for that of Ealdorman Atthel- 
wine and the Queen-mother. ‘Some years of tranquillity 
followed this victory; but though A«thelwine preserved 
order at home he showed little sense of the danger which 
threatened from abroad. .The North was girding itself for 
a fresh onset on England. The Scandinavian peoples had | 
drawn together into their kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden 
and Norway; and it was no longer in isolated bands but 
in national hosts that they were about to seek conquests 
in the South. As Athelred drew to manhood some chance 
descents on the coast told of this fresh stir in the North, 
and the usual result of the Northman’s presence was seen 
in new risings among the Welsh. 

In 991 Ealdorman Brihtnoth of East Anglia fell in 
battle with a Norwegian force at Maldon, and the with- 
drawal of the pirates had to be bought by money. 
AKthelwine too died at this moment, and the death 
of the two Ealdormen left Athelred free to act as King. 
But his aim was rather to save the Crown from his 
nobles than England from the Northmen. Handsome 
and pleasant of address, the young King’s pride showed 
itself in a string of imperial titles, and his restless and 
self-confident temper drove him to push the preten- 
sions of the Crown to their furthest extent. His aim- 
throughout his reign was to free himself from the dicta- 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 93 


tion of the great nobles, and it was his indifferenes to 
their “rede” or counsel that won him the name of 
*« Athelred the Redeless.” From the first he struck boldly 
at his foes, and Alfgar, the Ealdorman of Mercia whom 
the death of his rival Acthelwine left supreme in the realm, 
was driven by the King’s hate to desert toa Danish 
force which he was sent in 992 to drive from the coast. 
Aithelred turned from his triumph at home to meet 
the forces of the Danish and Norwegian Kings, Swegen 
and Olaf, which anchored off London in 994. His policy 
throughout was a policy of diplomacy rather than of 
arms, and a treaty of subsidy gave time for intrigues 
which parted the invaders till troubles at home drew both 
again to the North. Atthelred took quick advantage of 
his suecess at home and abroad ; the place of the great 
ealdormen in the royal councils was taken by court-thegns 
in whom we see the rudiments of a ministry, while the 
King’s fleet attacked the pirates’ haunts in Cumberland 
and the Cotentin. But in spite of all this activity the 
news of a fresh invasion found England more weak and 
broken than ever. The rise’ of the “new men” only 
widened the breach between the court and the great 
nobles, and their resentment showed itself in delays 
which foiled every attempt of A‘thelred to meet the 
pirate-bands who still clung to the coast. 

They came probably from the other side of the Chan- 
nel, and it was to clear them away as well as secure him- 
self against Swegen’s threatened descent that Atthelred 
took a step which brought England in contact with a 
land over-sea. Normandy, where the Northmen had set- 
tled a hundred years before, was now growing into a 
great power, and it was to win the friendship of Nor- 
mandy and to close its harbors against Swegen that 
/&thelred in 1002 took the Norman Duke’s daughter, 
Emma, to wife. The same dread of invasion gave birth 
to a panic of treason from the Northern mercenaries whom 
the King had drawn to settle in the land as a fighting 
force against their brethren; and an order of Aithelred 
brought about a general massacre of them on St. Brice’s 
day. Wedding and murder, however, proved feeble de- 


94 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


fences against Swegen. His fleet reached the coast in 
1003, and for four years he marched through the length 
and breadth of Southern and Eastern England, “lighting 
his war-beacons as he went” in blazing homestead and 
town. Then for a heavy bribe he withdrew, to prepare 
for a later and more terrible onset. But there was no 
rest for the realm. The fiercest of the Norwegian jarls 
took his place, and from Wessex the war extended over 
Mercia and East Anglia. In 1012 Canterbury was taken 
and sacked, A‘lfheah the Archbishop dragged to Green- 
wich, and there in default of ransom brutally slain. The 
Danes set him in the midst of their husting, pelting him 
with bones and skulls of oxen, till one more pitiful than 
the rest clove his head with an axe. Meanwhile the 
court was torn with intrigue and strife, with quarrels be- 
tween the court-thegns in their greed of power and yet 
fiercer quarrels between these favorites and the nobles 
whom they superseded in the royal councils. The King’s 
policy of finding aid among his new ministers broke down 
when these became themselves ealdormen. With their 
local position they took up the feudal claims of independ- 
ence ; and Eadric, whom A®thelred raised to be Ealdor- 
man of Mercia, became a power that overawed the 
Crown. In this paralysis of the central authority all 
organization and union was lost. ‘“ Shire would not help 
other” when Swegen returned in 1013. The war was 
terrible but short. Everywhere the country was pitilessly. 
harried, churches plundered, men slaughtered. But, 
with the one exception of London, there was no attempt 
at resistance. Oxford and Winchester flung open their 
gates. The thegns of Wessex submitted to the North- 
men at Bath. Even London was forced at last to give 
way, and Atthelred fled over-sea to arefuge in Normandy. 

He was soon called back again. In the opening of 
1014 Swegen died suddenly at Gainsborough ; and the 
spell of terror was broken. The Witan recalled “ their 
own born lord,” and Athelred returned to see the Danish 
fleet under Swegen’s son, Cnut, sail away to the North. 
It was but to plan a moreterrible return. Youth of 
nineteen as he was, Cnut showed from the first the vigor 


EARLY ENGLAND; 449—1071. 95 


of his temper. Setting aside his brother he made himself 
King of Denmark; and at once gathered a splendid fleet 
for a fresh attack on England, whose King and nobles 
were again at strife, and where a bitter quarrel between 
Ealdorman Eadric of Mercia and Atthelred’s son Eadmund 
Ironside broke the strength of the realm. The desertion 
of Eadric to Cnut as soon as he appeared off the coast 
threw open England to his arms; Wessex and Mercia 
submitted to him; and though the loyalty of London 
enabled Eadmund, when his father’s death raised him in 
1016 to the throne, to struggle bravely for a few months 
against the Danes, a decisive overthrow at Assandun 
and a treaty of partition which this wrested from him at 
Olney were soon followed by the young King’s death. 
Cnut was left master of the realm. His first acts of 
government showed little but the temper of the mere 
Northman, passionate, revengeful, uniting the guile of 
the savage with his thirst for blood. Eadric of Mercia, 
whose aid had given him the Crown, was felled by an 
axe-blow at the King’s signal ; a murder removed Eadwig, 
the brother of Eadmund Ironside, while the children ot 
Eadmund were hunted even into Hungary by his ruthless 
hate. But from a savage such as this the young con- 
queror rose abruptly into a wise and temyerate king. His 
aim during twenty years seems to have been to obliterate 
from men’s minds the foreign character of his rule and 
the bloodshed in which it had begun. 

Conqueror indeed as he was, the Dane was no for- 
eigner in the sense that the Norman was a foreigner after 
him. His language differed little from the English 
tongue. He brought in no new system of tenure or 
government. Cnut ruled in fact not as a foreign con- 
queror but as a native king. He dismissed his Danish 
host, and retaining only a trained band of household 
troops or “ hus-carles” to serve as a body-guard relied 
boldly for support within his realm on the justice and 
good government he secured it. He fell back on “* Eadgavr’s 
Law,” on the old constitution of the realm, for his rule 
of government; and owned no difference between Dane 
and Englishman among. his subjects. He identified 


96 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


himself even with the patriotism which had withstood 
the stranger. The Church had been the centre of the 
national resistance; Archbishop A‘lfheah had been slain 
by Danish hands. But Cnut sought the friendship of 
the Church; he translated A‘lfheah’s body with great 
pomp to Canterbury ; he atoned for his father’s ravages 
by gifts to the religious houses; he protected English 
pilgrims even against the robber-lords of the Alps. His 
love for monks broke out in a song which he composed as 
lie listened to their chaunt at Ely. “ Merrily sang the 
monks of Ely when Cnut King rowed by” across the 
vast fen-waters that surrounded their abbey. “Row, 
boatmen, near the land, and hear we these monks sing.” 
A letter which Cnut wrote after twelve years of rule to 
his English subjects marks the grandeur of his character | 
and the noble conception he had formed of kingship. 
“T have vowed to God to lead a right life in all things,” 
wrote the King, “to rule justly and piously my realms 
and subjects, and to administer just judgment to all. 
If heretofore I have done aught beyond what was just, 
through headiness or negligence of youth, I am ready, 
with God’s help, to amend it utterly.” No royal officer, 
either for fear of the King or for favor of any, is to 
consent to injustice, none is to do wrong to rich or poor 
“as they would value my friendship and their own well- 
being.” He especially denounces unfair exactions: “ I. 
have no need that money be heaped together for me by 
unjust demands.” “Ihave sent this letter before me.” 
Cnut ends, “ that all the people of my realm may rejoice 
in my well-doing; for as you yourselves know, never 
have I spared, nor will I spare, to spend myself and my 
toil in what is needful and good for my people.” 

Cnut’s greatest gift to his people was that of peace. 
With him began the long internal tranquillity which was 
from this time to be the key-note of the national history. 
Without, the Dane was no longer a terror; on the con- 
trary it was English ships and English soldiers who now 
appeared in the Northand followed Cnut in his campaigns 
against Wend or Norwegian. Within, the exhaustion 
which follows a long anarchy gave fresh strength to the 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 97 


Crown, and Cnut’s own ruling temper was backed by the 
force of hus-carles at his disposal. The four Earls of 
Northumberland, Mercia, Wessex, and East Anglia, 
whom he set in the place of the older ealdormen, knew 
themselves to be the creatures of his will; the ablest 
indeed of their number, Godwine, Earl of Wessex, was 
the minister or close counsellor of the King. The 
troubles along the Northern border were ended by a 
memorable act of policy. From Eadgar’s day the Scots 
had pressed further and further across the Firth of Forth 
till a victory of their King Malcolm over Earl Eadwulf 
at Carham in 1018 made him master of Northern North- 
umbria. In 1031 Cnut advanced to the North, but the 
quarrel ended in a formal cession of the district between 
the Forth and the Tweed, Lothian as it was called, to 
the Scot-King on his doing domage to Cnut. The gain 
told at once on the character of the Northern kingdom. 
The Kings of the Scots had till now been rulers simply 
of Gaelic and Celtic peoples; but from the moment that 
Lothian with its English farmers and English seamen 
became a part of their dominions it became the most 
important part. The Kings fixed their seat at Edinburgh, 
and in the midst of an English population passed from 
Gaelic chieftains into the Saxon rulers of a mingled 
people. 

But the greatness of Cnut’s rule hung solely on the 
greatness of his temper, and the Danish power was shaken 
by his death in 1035. The empire he had built up at 
once fell to pieces. He had bequeathed both England 
and Denmark to his son Harthacnut; but the boy’s 
absence enabled his brother, Harold Harefoot, to acquire 
all England save Godwine’s earldom of Wessex, and in 
the end even Godwine was forced to submit to him. 
Harolds death in 1040 averted a conflict between the 
brothers, and placed Harthacnut quietly on the throne. 
But the love which Cnut’s justice had won turned to 
hatred before the lawlessness of his successors. The 
long peace sickened men of their bloodshed and violence. 
“* Never was a bloodier deed done in the land since the 
Danes came,” ran a popular song, when Harold’s men 


98 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


seized Alfred, a brother of Eadmund Jronside, who 
returned to. England from Normandy where he had 
found a refuge since his father’s flight to its shores. 
Every tenth man among his followers was killed, the rest 
sold for slaves, and /®lfred’s eyes torn out at Ely. 
Harthacnut, more savage than his predecessor, dug up 
his brother’s body and flung it into a marsh; while a 
rising at Worcester against his hus-carles was punished 
by the burning of the town and the pillage of the shire. 
The young King’s death was no less brutal than his life ; 
in 1042 “he died as he stood at his drink in the house of 
Osgod Clapa at Lambeth.” England wearied of rulers 
such as these: but their crimes helped her to free herself 
from the impossible dream of Cnut. The North, still more 
barbarous than herself, could give her no new element of 
progress or civilization. It was the consciousness of this 
and a hatred of rulers such as Harold and Harthacnut 
which co-operated with the old feeling of reverence for 
the past in calling back the line of Atlfred to the throne. 

It is in such transitional moments of a nation’s his- 
tory that it needs the cool prudence, the sensitive Selfish- 
ness, the quick perception of what is possible, which dis- 
tinguished the adroit politician whom the death of Cnut 
left supreme in England. Originally of obscure origin, 
Godwine’s ability had raised him high in the royal favor ; 
he was allied to Cnut by marriage, entrusted by him with 
the earldom of Wessex, and at last made the Viceroy or 
justiciar of the King in the government of the realm. In 
the wars of Scandinavia he had shown courage and skill 
at the head of a body of English troops, but his true field 
of action lay at home. Shrewd, eloquent, an active ad- 
ministrator, Godwine united vigilance, industry and 
caution with a singular dexterity in the management of 
men. During the troubled years that followed the death 
of Cnut he did his best to continue his master’s policy 
in securing the internal union of England under a Danish 
sovereign and in preserving her connexion with the 
North. But at the death of Harthacnut Cnut’s policy 
had become impossible, and abandoning the Danish cause 
Godwine drifted with the tide of popular feeling which 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 99 


called Eadward, the one living son of Aithelred, to the 
throne. Eadward had lived from his youth in exile at 
the court of Normandy. <A halo of tenderness spread in 
after-time round this last King of the old English stock ; 
legends told of his pious simplicity, his blitheness and 
gentleness of mood, the holiness that gained him his 
name of “Confessor” and enshrined him as a Saint in 
his abbey-church at Westminster. Gleemen sang in man- 
lier tones of the long peace and glories of his reign, how 
warriors and wise counsellors stood round his throne, and 
Welsh and Scot, and Briton obeyed him. His was the 
one figure that stood out bright against the darkness 
when England lay trodden under foot by Norman con- 
querors; and so dear became his memory that liberty and 
independence itself seemed incarnate in his name. Instead 
of freedom, the subjects of William or Henry called for 
the “good laws of Eadward the Confessor.” But it was 
a mere shadow of the past that the exile ically returned 
to the throne of At‘lfred; there was something shadow- 
lke in his thin form, his delicate complexion, his trans- 
parent womanly hands; and itis almost as a shadow that 
he glides over the political stage. The work of govern- 
ment was done by sterner hands. 

Throughout his earlier reign, in fact, England lay in 
the hands of its three Earls, Siward of Northumbria, 
Leofric of Mercia, and Godwine of Wessex, and it seemed 
as if the feudal tendency to provincial separation against 
which Athelred had struggled was to triumph with the 
death of Cnut. What hindered this severance was the 
greed of Godwine. Siward was isolated in the North: 
Leofric’s earldom was but a fragment of Mercia. But the 
Earl of Wessex, already master of the wealthiest part of 
England, seized district after district for his house. His 
son Swegen secured an earldom in the south-west; his 
son Harold became Earl of East Anglia; his nephew 
Beorn was established in Central England: while the 
marriage of his daughter Eadgyth to the King himself 
gave Godwine a hold upon the throne. Policy led the 
Earl, as it led his son, rather to aim at winning England 
itself than at breaking up England to win a mere fief in 


100 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


it. But his aim found a sudden check through the law- 
lessness of his son Swegen. Swegen seduced the abbess 
of Leominster, sent her home again with a yet more out- 
rageous ieeastia of her hand in marriage, and on the 
King’s refusal to grant it fled from the realm. Godwine’s 
influence secured his pardon, but on his very return to 
seek it Swegen murdered his cousin Beorn who had op- 
posed the reconciliation and again fled to Flanders. A 
storm of national indignation followed him over-sea. The 
meeting of the Wise men branded him as “nithing,’” the 
+ utterly worthless,” yet in a year his father wrested a 
new pardon from the King and restored him to his earl- 
dom. The scandalous inlawing of such a criminal left 
Godwine alone in a struggle which soon arose with Ead- 
ward himself. The King was a stranger in his realm, 
and his sympathies lay naturally with the home and 
friends of his youth and exile. He spoke the Norman 
tongue. He used in Norman fashion a seal for his 
charters. He set Norman favorites in the highest posts 
of Church and State. Foreigners such as these, though 
hostile to the minister, were powerless against Godwine’s 
influence and ability, and when at a later time they ven- 
tured to stand alone against him they fell without a blow. 
But the general ill-will at Swegen’s inlawing enabled 
them to stir Eadward to attack the Earl, and in 1051 a 
trivial quarrel brought the opportunity ofa decisive break 
with him. On hisr etna n froma visit to the court Eustace, 
Count of Boulogne, the husband of the King’s sister, 
demanded quarters for his train in Dover. Strife arose, 
and many both of the burghers and foreigners were slain. 
All Godwine’s better nature withstood Eadward when 
the King angrily bade him exact vengeance from the 
town for the affront of his kinsman; and he claimed a 
fair trial for the’ townsmen. But Eadward looked on his 
refusal as an outrage, and the quarrel widened into open 
strife. Godwine at once gathered his forces and marched 
upon Gloucester, demanding the expulsion of the foreign 
favorites. But even in a just quarrel the country was 
cold in his support. The Earls of Mercia and Northum- 
berland united their forces to those of Eadward at Glou- 


FBARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 101 


cester, and marched with the King to a gathering of the 
Witenagemote at London. Godwine again appeared in 
arms, but Swegen’s outlawry was renewed, and the Earl 
of Wessex, declining with his usual prudence a useless 
struggle, withdrew over-sea to Flanders. 

But the wrath of the nation was appeased by his fall. 
Great as were Godwine’s faults, he was the one man who 
now stood between England and the rule of the strangers , 
who flocked to the Court; and a year had hardly passed 
when he was strong enough to return. At the appear- 
ance of his fleet in the Thames in 1052 Eadward was 
once more forced to yield. ‘The foreign prelates and 
bishops fled over-sea, outlawed by the same meeting of 
the Wise men which restored Godwine to his home. But 
he returned only to die, and the direction of affairs 
passed quietly to his son Harold. Harold came to power 
unfettered by the obstacles which beset his father, and 
for twelve years he was the actual governor of the realm. 
The courage, the ability, the genius for administration, 
the ambition and subtlety of Godwine were found again 
in his son. In the internal government of England he 
followed out his father’s policy while avoiding its ex- 
cesses. Peace was preserved, justice administered, and 
the realm increased in wealth and prosperity. Its gold 
work and @mbroidery became famous in the markets of 
Flanders and France. Disturbances from without were 
crushed sternly and rapidly; Harold’s military talents 
displayed themselves in a campaign against Wales, and 
in the boldness and rapidity with which, arming his troops 
with weapons adapted for mountain conflict, he pene- 
trated to the heart of its fastnesses and reduced the 
country to complete submission. With the gift of the 
Northumbrian earldom on Siward’s death to his brother 
Tostig all England save a small part of the older Mercia 
lay in the hands of the house of Godwine, and as the 
waning health of the King, the death of his nephew, the 
son of Eadmund who had returned from Hungary as his 
heir, and the childhood of the Atheling Eadgar who 
stood next in blood, removed obstacle after obstacle to 
his plans, Harold patiently but steadily moved forward 
to the throne. 


oe 


102 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


But his advance was watched by one even more able 
and ambitious than himself. For the last half century 
England had been drawing nearer to the Norman land 
which fronted it across the Channel. As we pass now- 
adays through Normandy, it is English history which is 
round about us. The name of hamlet after hamlet has 
memories for English ears; a fragment of castle wall 
marks the home of the Bruce, a tiny village preserves 
the name of the Percy. ‘The very look of the country 
_ and its people seem familiar to us; the Norman peasant 
in his cap and blouse recalls the build and features of the 
small English farmer; the fields about Caen, with their 
dense hedgerows, their elms, their apple-orchards, are the 
very picture of an English country-side. Huge cathe- 
drals lift themselves over the red-tiled roofs of little 
market towns, the models of stately fabrics which super- 
seded the lowlier churches of A¢lfred or Dunstan, while 
the windy heights that look over orchard and meadow- 
land are crowned with the square gray keeps which Nor- 
mandy gave to the cliffs of Richmond and the banks of 
Thames. It was Rolf the Ganger, or Walker, a pirate 
leader like Guthrum or Hasting, who wrested this land 
from the French king, Charles the Simple, in 912, at the 
moment when /Elfred’s children were beginning their 
conquest of the English Danelagh. The treaty of Clair- 
on-Epte in which France purchased peace by this cession 
of the coast was a close imitation of the Peace of Wed- 
more. Rolf, like Guthrum, was baptized, received the 
King’s daughter in marriage, and became his vassal for 
the territory which now took the name of “ the North- 
man’s land” or Normandy. But vassalage and the new 
faith sat lightly on the Dane. No such ties of blood and 
speech tended to unite the Northman with the French 
among whom he settled along the Seine as united him 
to the Englishmen among whom he settled along the 
Humber. William Longsword, the son of Rolf, though 
wavering towards France and Christianity, remained a 
Northman in heart; he called in a Danish colony to 
occupy his conquest of the Cotentin, the peninsula which 
runs out from St. Michaels’ Mount to the cliffs of Cher- 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 103 


bourg, and reared his boy among the Northmen of 
Bayeux where the Danish tongue and fashions most 
stubbornly held their own. <A heathen reaction followed 
his death, and the bulk of the Normans, with the child 
Duke Richard, fell away for the time from Christianity, 
while new pirate-fleets came swarming up the Seine. 
Yo the close of the century the whole people were still 
** Pirates”? to the French around them, their land the 
‘Pirates’ land,” their Duke the *“‘ Pirates’ Duke.” Yet 
in the end the same forces which merged the Dane in 
the Englishman told even more powerfully on the Dane 
in France. No race has ever shown a greater power of 
absorbing all the nobler characteristics of the peoples 
with whom they came in contact, or of infusing their 
own energy into them. During the long reign of Duke 
Richard the Fearless, the son of William Longsword, a 
reign which lasted from 945 to 996, the heathen North- 
men pirates became French Christians and feudal at 
heart. The old Norse language lived only at Bayeux 
and in a few local names. As the old Northern freedom 
died silently away, the descendants of the pirates be- 
eame feudal nobles and the “ Pirates’ land” sank into 
the most loyal of the fiefs of France. 
_ From the moment of their settlement on the Frankish 
coast, the Normans had been jealously watched by the 
English kings; and the anxiety of Athelred for their 
friendship set a Norman woman on the English throne. 
The marriage of Emma with Athelred brought about a 
close political connection between the two countries. It 
was in Normandy that the King found a refuge from 
Swegen’s invasion, and his younger boys grew up in 
exile at the Norman court. Their presenee there drew 
the eyes of every Norman to the rich land which offered 
so tempting a prey across the Channel. The energy 
which they had shown in winning their land from the 
Franks, in absorbing the French civilization and the 
French religion, was now showing itself in adventures 
on far-off shores, in crusades against the Moslem of Spain 
or the Arabs of Sicily. It was this spirit of adventure 
that roused the Norman Duke Robert to sail against 


104 HISTORY OF TH" ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


England in Cnut’s day under pretext of setting A‘thel- 
red’s children on its throne, but the wreck of his fleet in 
a storm put an end to a project. which might have antici- 
pated the work of his son. It was that son, William the 
Great, as men of his own day styled him, William the 
Conqueror as he was to stamp himself by one event on 
English history, who was now Duke of Normandy. The 
full grandeur of his indomitable will, his large and 
patient statesmanship, the loftiness of aim which lifts 
him out of the petty incidents of his age, were as yet 
only partly disclosed. But there never had been a 
moment from his boyhood when he was not among the 
greatest of men. His life from the very first was one 
long mastering of difficulty after difficulty. The shame 
of his birth remained in his name of * the Bastard.” His 
father Robert had seen Arlotta, a tanner’s daughter of 
the town, as she washed her linen in a little brook by 
Falaise ; and loving her he had made her the mother of 
his boy. The departure of Robert on a pilgrimage from 
which he never returned left William a child-ruler 
among the most turbulent baronage in Christendom ; 
treason and anarchy surrounded him as he grew to man- 
hood; and disorder broke at last into open revolt. But 
in 1047 a fierce combat of horse on the slopes of Val-és- _ 
dunes beside Caen left the young Duke master of his 
duchy and he soon made his mastery felt. ** Normans,” 
said a Norman poet, “must be trodden down and kept 
under foot, for he only that bridles them may use them 
at his need.” In the stern order he forced on the land 
Normandy from this hour felt the bridle of its Duke. 
Secure at home, William seized the moment of God- 
wine’s exile to visit England, and received from: his 
cousin, King Eadward, as he afterwards asserted, a 
promise of succession to his throne. Such a promise 
however, unconfirmed by the Witenagemote, was value- 
less ; and the return of Godwine must have at once cut 
short the young Duke’s hopes. He found in fact work 
enough to do in his own duchy, for the discontent of his 
baronage at the stern justice of his rule found support 
in the jealousy which his power raised in the states 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 105 


around him, and it was only after two great victories at 
Mortemer and Varaville and six years of hard fighting 
that outer and inner foes were alike trodden under foot. 
In 1060 William stood first among the princes of France. 
Maine submitted to his rule. Britanny was reduced to 
obedience by a single march. While some of the rebel 
barons rotted in the Duke’s dungeons and some were 
driven into exile, the land settled down into a peace 
which gave room fora quick upgrowth of wealth and 
culture. Learning and education found their centre in 
the school of Bec, which the teaching of a Lombard | 
scholar, Lanfranc, raised in a few years into the most 
famous school of Christendom. Lanfranc’s first contact 
with William, if it showed the Duke’s imperious temper, 
showed too his marvellous insight into men. Ina strife 
with the Papacy which William provoked by his mar- 
riage with Matilda, a daughter of the Count of Flanders, 
Lanfranc took the side of Rome. His opposition was 
met by a sentence of banishment, and the Prior had 
hardly set out on a lame horse, the only one his house 
could afford, when he was overtaken by*the Duke, im- 
patient that he should quit Normandy. ‘“4ive me a 
better horse and I shall go the quicker,” replied the im- 
perturbable Lombard, and William’s wrath ‘passed into 
laughter and good will. From that hour Lanfranc be- 
came his minister and counsellor, whether for affairs in 
the duchy itself or for the more daring schemes of ambi- 
tion which opened up across the Channel. 

William’s hopes of the English crown are said to have 
been revived by a storm which threw Harold, while 
cruising in the Channel, on the coast of Ponthieu. Its 
count sold him to the Duke ; and as the price of return 
to England William forced him to swear on the relics of 
saints to support his claim to its throne. But, true or 
no, the oath told little on Harold’s course. As the child- 
less King drew to his grave one obstacle after another was 
cleared from the Earl’s path. His brother Tostig had 
become his most dangerous rival; but a revolt cf the 
Northumbrians drove Tostig to Flanders, and the Earl 
was able to win over the Mercian house of Leofri¢ to his 


106 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPL2. 


cause by owning Morkere, the brother of the Mercian 
Earl Eadwine, as his brother’s successor. His aim was in 
fact attained without a struggle. In the opening of 1066 
the nobles and bishops who gathered round the death-bed 
of the Confessor passed quietly from it to the election 
and coronation of Harold. But at Rouen the news was 
welcomed with a burst of furious passion, and the Duke of 
Normandy at once prepared to enforce his claim by arms. 
William did not claim the Crown. He claimed simply the 
right which he afterwards used when his sword had won 
it of presenting himself for election by the nation, and 
he believed himself entitled so to present himself by the 
direct commendation of the Confessor. The actual elec- 
tion of Harold which stood in his way, hurried as it was, 
he did not recognize as valid. But with this constitu- 
tional claim was inextricably mingled resentment at the 
private wrong which Harold had done him, and a resolve 
to exact vengeance on the man whom he regarded as 
untrue to his oath. The difficulties in the way of his 
enterprise were indeed enormous. He could reckon on no 
support within*England itself. At home he had to extort 
the consent of his own reluctant baronage; to gather a 
motley host from every quarter of France and to keep it 
together for months; to create a fleet, to cut down the 
very trees, to build, to launch, to man the vessels; and to 
find time amidst all this for the common business of gov- 
ernment, for negotiations with Denmark and the Empire. 
with France, Britanny, and Anjou, with Flanders and 
with Rome which had been estranged from England by 
Archbishop Stigand’s acceptance of his pallium from one 
who was not owned as a canonical Pope. 

But his rival’s difficulties were hardly less than his own. 
Harold was threatened with invasion not only by William 
but by his brother Tostig, who had taken refuge in 
Norway and secured the aid of its King, Harald Har- 
drada. The fleet and army he had gathered lay watch- 
ing for months along the coast. His one standing force 
was his body of hus-carles, but their numbers only enabled 
them to act as the nucleus of an army. On the other 
hand the Land-fyrd or general levy of fighting-men was a 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 107 


body easy to raise for any single encounter but hard to 
keep together. ‘To assemble such a force was to bring 
labor to a standstill. The men gathered under the 
King’s standard were the farmers and ploughmen of their 
fields. The ships were the fishing-vessels of the coast. 
In September the task of holding them together became 
impossible, but their dispersion had hardly taken place 
when the two clouds which had so long been gathering 
burst at onceupon therealm. A change of wind released 
the landlocked armament of William; but before chang- 
ing, the wind which prisoned the Duke brought the host 
of Tostig and Harald Hardrada to the coast of Yorkshire, | 
The King hastened with his household troops to the north 
and repulsed the Norwegians in a decisive overthrow at 
Stamford Bridge, but ere he could hurry back to London 
the Norman host had crossed the sea and William, who 
had anchored on the twenty-eighth of September off 
Pevensey, was ravaging the coast to bring his rival to an 
engagement. His merciless ravages succeeded in draw- 
ing Harold from London to -the south; but the King 
wisely refused to attack with the troops he had hastily 
summoned to his banner. If he was forced to give battle, 
he resolved to give it on ground he had himself chosen, 
and advancing near enough to the coast to check Wil- 
lam’s ravages he entrenched himself on a hill known 
afterwards as that of Senlac, a low spur of the Sussex 
downs near Hastings. His position covered London and 
drove William to concentrate his forces. With a host 
subsisting by pillage, to concentrate is to starve; and no 
alternative was left to the Duke but a decisive victory or 
ruin. 

On the fourteenth of October William led his men at 
dawn along the higher ground that leads from Hastings 
to the battle-field which Harold had chosen. From the 
mound of Telham the Normans saw the host of the Eng- 
lish gathered thickly behind a rough trench and a stock- 
ade on theheight ofSenlac. Marshy ground covered their 
right ; on the left, the most exposed part of the position, 
the hus-carles or body-guard of Harold, men in full armor 
and wielding huge axes, were grouped round the Golden 


108 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Dragon of Wessex and the Standard of the King. The 
rest of the ground was covered by thick masses of halfs 
armed rustics who had flocked at Harold’s summons to the 
fight with thestranger. It was against the centre of this 
formidable position that William arrayed his Norman 
knighthood, while the mercenary forces he had gathered 
in France and Britanny were ordered to attack its flanks. 
A general charge of the Norman foot opened the battle ; 
in front rode the minstrel Taillefer, tossing his sword in 
the air and catching it again while he chaunted the song 
of Roland. He was the first of the host who struck a 
blow, and he was the first to fall. The charge broke vainly 
on the stout stockade behind which the English warriors 
plied axe and javelin with fierce cries of “ Out, out,” and 
the repulse of the Norman footmen was followed by a re- 
pulse of the Norman horse. Again and again the Duke 
rallied and led them to the fatal stockade. All the fury of 
fight that glowed in his Norseman’s blood, all the head- 
long valor that spurred him over the slopes of Val-és- 
dunes, mingled that day with the coolness of head, the 
dogged perseverance, the inexhaustible faculty of resource 
which shone at Mortemer and Varaville. His Breton 
troops, entangled in the marshy ground on his left broke 
in disorder, and as panic spread through the army a cry 
arose that the Duke was slain. William tore off his 
helmet; “I live,’ he shouted, ‘ and by God’s help I will 
conquer yet.” Maddened by a fresh repulse, the Duke 
spurred right at the Standard; unhorsed, his terrible 
mace struck down Gyrth, the King’s brother; again dis- 
mounted, a blow from his hand hurled to the ground an 
unmannerly rider who would not lend him his steed. 
Amidst the roar and tumult of the battle he turned the 
flight he had arrested into the means of victory. Broken 
as the stockade was by his desperate onset, the shield-wali 
of the warriors behind it still held the Normans at bay 
till William by a feint of flight drew a part of the English 
force from their post of vantage. Turning on his disor- 
derly pursuers, the Duke cut them to pieces, broke through 
the abandoned line, and made himself master of the cen- 
tral ground. Meanwhile the French and Bretons made 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 109 


good their ascent on either flank. At three the hill seemed 
won, at six the fight still raged around the Standard 
where Harold’s hus-carles stood stubbornly at bay ona 
spot marked afterwards by the highaltar of Battle Abbey. 
An order from the Duke at last brought his archers to the 
front. Their arrow-flight told heavily on the dense masses 
crowded around the King and as the sun went down a 
shaft pierced Harold’s right eye. He fell between the 
royal ensigns, and the battle closed with a desperate melly 
over his corpse. 

Night covered the flight of the English army; but 
William was quick to reap the advantage of his victory. 
Securing Romney and Dover, he marched by Canterbury — 
upon London. Faction and intrigue were doing his work 
for him as he advanced ; for Harold’s brothers had fallen 
with the King on the field of Senlac, and there was none 
of the house of Godwine to contest the crown. Of the 
old royal line there remained but a single boy, Hadgar 
the Aitheling. He was chosen King; but the choice 
gave little strength to the national cause. The widow 
of the Confessor surrendered Winchester to the Duke. 
The bishops gathered at London inclined to submission. 
The citizens themselves faltered as William, passing by 
their walls, gave Southwark to the flames. The throne 
of the boy-king really rested for support on the Earls of 
Mercia and Northumbria, Eadwine and Morkere; and 
William, crossing the Thames at Wallingford and march- 
ing into Hertfordshire, threatened to cut them off from 
their earldoms. The masterly movement forced the Earls 
to hurry home, and London gave way at once. Eadgar 
himself was at the head of the deputation who came to 
offer the crown to the Norman Duke. ‘They bowed to 
him,” says the English annalist, pathetically, ‘: for need.” 
They bowed to the Norman as they had bowed to the 
Dane, and William accepted the crown in the spirit of 
Cnut. London indeed was secured by the erection of a 
fortress which afterwards grew into the Tower, but Wil- 
liam desired to reign not as a conqueror but as a lawful 
king. At Christmas he received the crown at Westmin- 
ster from the hands of Archbishop Ealdred amid shouts 


110 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


of * Yea, Yea,” from his new English subjects. Fines 
from the greater landowners atoned for a resistance which 
now counted as rebellion; but with this exception every 
measure of the new sovereign showed his desire of ruling 
as a successor of Eadward or Atlfred. As yet indeed the 
ereater part of England remained quietly aloof from him, 
and he can hardly be said to have been recognized as king 
by Northumberland or the greater part of Mercia. But 
to the east of a line which stretched from Norwich to 
Dorsetshire his rule was unquestioned, and over this por- 
tion he ruled as an English king. His soldiers were kept 
in strict order. No change was made in law or custom. 
The privileges of London were recognized by a royal writ 
which still remains, the most venerable of its muniments, 
among the city’s archives. Peace and order were re- 
stored. William even attempted, though in vain, to learn 
the English tongue that he might personally administer 
justice to the suitors in his court. The kingdom seemed 
so tranquil that only a few months had passed after the 
battle of Senlac when leaving England in charge of his 
brother, Odo Bishop of Bayeux, and his minister, Wil- 
liam Fitz-Osbern, the King returned in 1067 for a while 
to Normandy. ‘The peace he left was soon indeed dis- 
turbed. Bishop Odo’s tyranny forced the Kentishmen to 
seek aid from Count Eustace of Boulogne; while the 
Welsh princes supported a similar rising against Norman 
oppression in the west. But as yet the bulk of the land 
held fairly to the king. Dover was saved from Eustace ; 
and the discontented fled over sea to seek refuge inlands 
as far off as Constantinople, where Englishmen from this 
time formed great part of the body-guard or Varangians 
of the Eastern Emperors. William returned to take his 
place again as an English King. It was with an English 
force that he subdued a rising in the south-west with Ex- 
eter at its head, and it was at the head of an English 
army that he completed his work by marching to the 
North. His march brought Eadwine and Morkere again 
to submission, a fresh rising ended in the occupation of — 
York, and England as far as the Tees lay quietly at Wil- 
liam’s feet. 


EARLY ENGLAND. 449—1071. 111 


It was in fact only the national revolt of 1068 that 
transformed the King into a conqueror. The signal for 
this revolt came from Swegen, King of Denmark, who 
had for two years past been preparing to dispute Eng- 
land with the Norman, but on the appearance of his fleet 
in the Humber all northern, all western and south-west- 
ern England rose as one man. LEadgar the Atheling 
with a band of exiles who had found refuge in Scotland 
took the head of the Northumbrian revolt; in the south- 
west the men of Devon, Somerset, and Dorset gathered 
to the sieges of Exeter and Montacute; while a new 
Norman castle at Shrewsbury alone bridled a rising in 
the West. So ably had the revolt been planned that 
even William was taken by surprise. The outbreak was 
heralded by a storm of York and the slaughter of three 
thousand Normans who formed its garrison. The news 
of this slaughter reached William as he was hunting in 
the forest of Dean; and in a wild outburst of wrath he 
swore “by the splendor of God” to avenge himself on 
the North. But wrath went hand in hand with the cool- 
est statesmanship. The centre of resistance lay in the 
Danish fleet, and pushing rapidly to the Humber with a 
handful of horsemen William bought at a heavy price 
its inactivity and withdrawal. Then turning westward 
with the troops that gathered round him he swept the 
Welsh border and relieved Shrewsbury while William 
Fitz-Osbern broke the rising around Exeter. His success 
set the King free to fulfil his oath of vengeance on the 
North. After along delay before the flooded waters of 
the Aire he entered York and ravaged the whole country 
as far as the Tees. Town and village were harried and 
burned, their inhabitants were slain or driven over the 
Scottish border. The coast was especially wasted that 
that no hold might remain for future landings of the 
Danes. Crops, cattle, the very implements of husbandry 
were so mercilessly destroyed that a famine which fol- 
lowed is said to have swept offmore than a hundred thou- 
sand victims. Halfa century later indeed the land still lay 
bare of culture and deserted of men for sixty miles north- 
ward of York. The work of vengeance once over, Wil- 


112 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


liam led his army back from the Tees to York, an& chence 
to Chester and the West. Never had he shown the 
erandeur of his character so memorably as in this terrible 
march. The winter was hard, the roads choked with 
snowdrifts or broken by torrents, provisions failed ; and 
his army, storm-beaten and forced to devour its horses 
for food, broke out into mutiny at the order to cross the 
bleak moorlands that part Yorkshire from the West. 
The mercenaries from Anjou and Britanny demanded 
their release from service. William granted their prayer 
with scorn. On foot, at the head of the troops which 
still clung to him, he forced his way by paths inaccessi- 
ble to horses, often helping the men with his own hands 
to clear the road, and as the army descended upon Ches- 
ter the resistance of the English died away. 

For two years William was able to busy himself in cas- 
tle building and in measures for holding down the con- 
quered land. How effective these were was seen when 
the last act of the conquest was reached. All hope of 
Danish aid was now gone, but Englishmen still looked 
for help to Scotland where Eadgar the /&theling had 
again found refuge and where his sister Margaret 
had become wife of King Malcolm. It was probably 
some assurance of Malcolm’s aid which roused the Mer- 
cian Earls, Eadwine and Morkere, to a fresh rising in 
1071. But the revolt was at once foiled by the vigilance 
of the Conqueror. Eadwine fell in an obscure skirmish, 
while Morkere found shelter for a while in the fen coun- 
try where a desperate band of patriots gathered round 
an outlawed leader, Hereward. Nowhere had William 
found so stubborn a resistance: but a causeway two 
miles long was at last driven across the marshes, and the 
last hopes of English freedom died in the surrender of 
Ely. It was as the unquestioned master of England that 
William marched to the North, crossed the Lowlands 
and the Forth, and saw Malcolm appear in his camp upon 
the Tay to swear fealty at his feet. 


BOOK IL 
EN GLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 
1071—1214, 


Baath 


: 
I 


AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK II. 
1071-—-1214. 


AMONG the Norman chroniclers Orderic becomes from this point 
particularly valuable and detailed. The Chronicle and Florence of Wor- 
cester remain the primary English authorities, while Simeon of Durham 
gives much special information on northern matters. For the reign of 
William the Red the chief source of information is Eadmer, a monk of 
Canterbury, in his ‘* Historia Novorum ”’ and ‘‘ Life of Anselm.’’ Wil- 
liam of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon are both contemporary 
authorities during that of Henry the First ; the latter remains a brief 
but accurate annalist ; the former is the leader of anew historic school, 
who treat English events as parts of the history of the world, and 
emulate classic models by a more philosophical arrangement of their 
materials. To these the opening of Stephen’s reign adds the “ Gesta 
Stephani,” a record in great detail by one of the King’s clerks, and 
the Hexham Chroniclers. 

All this wealth of historical material however suddenly leaves us in 
the chaos of civil war. Even the Chronicle dies out in the midst of 
Stephen’s reign, and the close at the same time of the works we have 
noted leaves a blank in our historical literature which. extends over 
the early years of Henry the Second. But this dearth is followed by a 
vast outburst of historical industry. For the Beket struggle we have 
the mass of the Archbishop’s own correspondence with that of Foliot 
and John of Salisbury. From 1169 to 1192 our primary authority is 
the Chronicle known as that of Benedict of Peterborough, whose 
authorship Professor Stubbs has shown to be more probably due to the 
royal treasurer, Bishop Richard Fitz-Neal. This is continued to 1201 
by Roger of Howden in a record of equally official value. William of 
Newborough’s history, which ends in 1198, is a work of the classical 
school, like William of Malmesbury’s. It is distinguished by its fair- 
ness and good sense. To these may be added the Chronicle of Ralph 
Niger, with the additions of Ralph of Coggeshall. that of Gervais of 
Canterbury, and the interesting life of St. Hugh of Lincoln. 

But the intellectual energy of Henry the Second’s time is shown 
even more remarkably in the mass of general literature which lies 
behind these distinctively historical sources, in the treatises of John of 
Salisbury, the voluminous works of Giraldus Cambrensis, the ‘‘ Trifles”’ 
and satires of Walter Map, Glanvill’s treatise on Law, Richard Fitz- 
Neal’s ‘‘ Dialogue on the Exchequer,’’ to which we owe our knowledge 
of Henry’s financial system, the romances of Gaimar and of Wace, the 
poem of the San Graal. But this intellectual fertility is far a ceas~ 

115) 


116 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


ing with Henry the Second. The thirteenth century has hardly begun 
when the romantic impulse quickens even the old English tongue in 
the long poem of Layamon. The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes and 
an ‘‘Itinerarium Regis’’ supplement Roger of Howden for Richard’s 
reign. With John we enter upon the Annals of Barnwell and are aided 
by the invaluable series of the Chroniclers of St. Albans. Among the 
side topics of the time, we may find much information as to the Jews 
in Toovey’s ‘‘ Anglia Judaica ;”’ the Chronicle of Jocelyn of Brakelond 
gives us a peep into social and monastic life ; the Cistercian revival 
may be traced in the records of the Cistercian abbéys in Dugdale’s 
Monasticon ; the Charter Rolls give some information as to municipal 
history ; and constitutional development may be traced in the docu 
ments collected by Professor Stubbs in his ‘*‘ Select Charters.”’ 


CHAPTER I. 
THE CONQUEROR. 
1071-1085. 


In the five hundred years that followed the landing of 
Hengest Britain had become England, and its conquest 
had ended in the settlement of its conquerors, in their 
conversion to Christianity, in the birth of a national 
literature, ot an imperfect civilization, of a rough political 
order. But through the whole of this earlier age every 
attempt to fuse the various tribes of conquerors into a 
single nation had failed. The effort of Northumbria to 
extend her rule over all England had been foiled by the 
resistance of Mercia; that of Mercia by the resistance of 
Wessex. Wessex herself, even under the guidance of 
great kings and statesmen, had no sooner reduced the 
country to a seeming unity than local independence rose 
again at the callof the Northmen. The sense of a single 
England deepened with the pressure of the invaders; 
the monarchy of A‘lfred and his house broadened into an 
English kingdom ; but still tribal jealousies battled with 
national unity. Northumbrian lay apart from West- 
Saxon, Northman from Englishman. A common national 
sympathy held the country roughly together, but a real 
national union had yet to come. It came with foreign 
rule. The rule of the Danish kings broke local jeal- 
ousies as they had never been broken before, and _ be- 
queathed a new England to Godwine and the confessor. 
But Cnut was more Englishman than Northman, and his 
system of government was an English system, The true 
foreign yoke was only felt when England saw its con- 


queror in William the Norman. . 
(117) 


118 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


For nearly a century and a half, from the hour when 
William turned triumphant from the fens of Ely to the 
hour when John fled defeated from Norman shores, our 
story is one of foreign masters. Kings from Normandy 
were followed by kings from Anjou. But whether under 
Norman or Angevin Englishmen were a subject race, con- 
quered and ruled by men of strange blood and of strange 
speech. And yet it was in these years of subjection that 
England first became really England. Provincial differ- 
ences were finally crushed into national unity by the 
pressure of the stranger. The firm government of her 
foreign kings secured the land a long and almost un- 
broken peace in which the new nation grew to a sense 
of its oneness, and this consciousness was strengthened 
by the political ability which in Henry the First gave it 
administrative order and in Henry the Second built up 
the fabric of its law. New elements of social life were 
developed alike by the suffering and the prosperity of 
the times. The wrong which had been done by the deg- ~ 
radation of the free landowner into a feudal dependant 
was partially redressed by the degradation of the bulk of 
the English lords themselves into a middle class as they 
were pushed from their place by the foreign baronage 
who settled on English soil; and this social change was 
accompanied by a gradual enrichment and elevation of 
the class of servile and semi-servile cultivators which had 
lifted them at the close of this period into almost com- 
plete freedom. The middle-class which was thus created 
was reinforced by the upgrowth of a corresponding class 
in our towns. Commerce and trade were promoted by 
the justice and policy of the foreign kings; and with 
their advance rose the political importance of the trader. 
The boroughs of England, which at the opening of this 
period were for the most part mere villages, were rich 
enough at its close to buy liberty from the Crown and to 
stand ready for the mightier part they were to play in 
the development of our parliament. The shame of con- 
quest, the oppression of the conquerors, begot a moral 
and religious revival which raised religion into a living 
thing; while the close connection with the Continent 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 119 


which foreign conquest brought about secured for Eng- 
land a new communion with the artistic and intellectual 
life of the world without her. 

In a word, it is to the stern discipline of our foreign 
kings that we owe not merely English wealth and Eng- 
lish freedom but England herself. And of these foreign 
masters the greatest was William of Normandy. In 
William the wild impulses of the Northman’s blood 
mingled strangely with the cool temper of the modern 
statesman. As he was the last, so he wast the most ter- 
rible outcome of the northern race. The very spirit of 
the sea-robbers from whom he sprang seemed embodied | 
in his gigantic form, his enormous strength, his savage 
countenance, his desperate bravery, the fury of his 
wrath, the ruthlessness of his revenge. ‘“ No knight un- 
der Heaven,’ his enemies owned, ‘“ was William’s peer.” 
Boy as he was at Val-és-dunes, horse and man went down 
before his lance. All the fierce gayety of his nature 
broke out in the warfare of his youth, in his rout of fif- 
teen Angevins with but five men at his back, in his 
defiant ride over the ground which Geoffry Martel 
claimed from him, a ride with hawk on fist as if war and 
the chase were one. No man could bend William’s bow. 
His mace crashed its way through a ring of English war- 
riors to the foot of the Standard. He rose to his greatest 
height at moments when other men despaired. His 
voice rang out as a trumpet when his soldiers fled before 
the English charge at Senlac, and his rally turned the 
flight into a means of victory. In his winter march on 
Chester he strode afoot at the head of his fainting troops 
and helped with his own hand to clear a road through 
the snowdrifts. And with the Northman’s daring broke 
out the Northman’s pitilessness. When the townsmen 
of Alencon hung raw hides along their walls in scorn of 
the “tanner’s” grandson, William tore out his prisoners’ 
eyes, hewed off their hands and feet, and flung them into 
the town. Hundreds of Hampshire men were driven 
from their homes to make him a hunting-ground and his 
harrying of Northumbria left Northern England a des- 
olate waste. Of men’s love or hate he recked little. 


120 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


His grim look, his pride, his silence, his wild outbursts 
of passion, left William lonely even in his court. His 
subjects trembled as he passed. ‘Stark man he was,” 
writes the English chronicler, “and great awe men had 
of him.” His very wrath was solitary. “To no man- 
spake he and no man dared speak to him,’ when the 
news reached him of Harold’s seizure of the throne. It 
was only when he passed from his palace to the loneliness 
of the woods that the King’s temper unbent. ‘ He loved 
the wild deer as though he had been their father.” 

It was the genius of William which lifted him out of 
this mere Northman into a great general and a great 
statesman. The wary strategy of his French campaigns, 
the organization of his attack upon England, the victory 
at Senlac, the quick resource, the steady perseverance 
which achieved the Conquest showed the wide range of 
his generalship. His political ability had shown itself 
from the first moment of his accession to the ducal 
throne. William had the instinct of government. He 
had hardly reached manhood when Normandy lay peace- 
ful at his feet. Revolt was crushed. Disorder was 
trampled under foot. The Duke “could never love a 
robber,” be he baron or knave. The sternness of his 
temper stamped itself throughout upon his rule. “Stark 
he was to men that withstood him,” says the Chronicler 
of his English system of government; “so harsh and 
cruel was he that none dared withstand his will. Earls 
that did aught against his bidding he cast into bonds ; 
bishops he stripped of their bishoprics, abbots of their 
abbacies. He spared not his own brother: first he was 
in the land, but the King cast him into bondage. Ifa 
man would live and hold his lands, need it were he fol- 
lowed the King’s will.” Stern as such a rule was, its 
sternness gave rest to the land. Even amidst the suffer- 
ings which necessarily sprang from the circumstances of 
the Conquest itself, from the erection of castles or the 
enclosure of forests or the exactions which built up 
William’s hoard at Winchester, Englishmen were unable 
to forget “the good peace he made in the land, so that a 
man might fare over his realm with a bosom full of gold.” 


{ 
ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 121 


Strange touches too of a humanity far in advance of his 
age contrasted with this general temper of the Con- 
queror’s government. One of the strongest traits in his 
character was an aversion to shed blood by process of 
law, he formally abolished the punishment of death, and 
only a single execution stains the annals of his reign. 
An edict yet more honorable to his humanity put an end 
to the slave-trade which had till then been carried on at 
the port of Bristol. ‘The contrast between the ruthless- 
ness and pitifulness of his public acts sprang indeed from 
a contrast within his temper itself. The pitiless warrior, 
the stern and awful king was a tender and faithful hus- 
band, an affectionate father. The lonely silence of his 
bearing broke into gracious converse with pure and 
sacred souls like Anselm. If William was “stark” to 
rebel and baron, men noted that he was “ mild to those 
that loved God.” 

But the greatness of the Conqueror was seen in more 
than the order and peace which he imposed upon the 
land. Fortune had given him one of the greatest oppor- 
tunities over offered to a king of stamping his own genius 
on the destinies of a people; and it is the way in ‘which 
he seized on this opportunity which has set William 
among the foremost statesmen of the world. The struggle 
which ended in the fens of Ely had wholly changed his 
position. He no longer held the land merely as its 
national and elected King. To his elective right he 
added the right of conquest. It is the way in which 
William grasped and employed this double power that 
marks the originality of his political genius, for the 
system of government which he devised was in fact the 
result of this double origin of his rule. It represented 
neither the purely feudal system of the Continent nor 
the system of the older English royalty : more truly per- 
haps it may be said to have represented both. As the 
conqueror of England William developed the military 
organization of feudalism so far as was necessary for thie 
secure possession of his conquests. The ground was 
already prepared for such an organization. We have 
watched the beginnings of English feudalism in the 


/ 


722 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


warriors, the “companions” or “thegns” who were 
personally attached to the king’s war-band and received 
estates from the folkland in reward for their personal 
services. In later times this feudal distribution of 
estates had greatly increased as the bulk of the nobles 
followed the king’s example and bound their tenants to 
themselves by-a similar process of subinfeudation. The 
pure freeholders on the other hand, the class which 
formed the basis of the original English society, had been 
evadually reduced in number, partly through imitation 
of the class above them, but more through the pressure 
of the Danish wars and the social disturbance consequent 
upon them which forced these freemen to seek protectors 
among the thegns at the cost of their independence. 
Even before the reign of William therefore feudalism 
was surperseding the older freedom in England as it had 
already superseded it in Germany or France. But the 
tendency was quickened and intensified by the Conquest. 
The desperate and universal resistance of the country 
forced William to hold by the sword what the sword had 
won ; and an army strong enough to crush at any moment 
a national revolt was needful for the preservation of his 
throne. Such an army could only be maintained by a 
vast confiscation of the soil, and the failure of the English 
risings cleared the ground for its establishment. The 
greater part of the higher nobility fell in battle or fled 
into exile, while the lower thegnhood either forfeited 
the whole of their lands or redeemed a portion by the 
surrender of the rest. We see the completeness of the 
confiscation in the vast estates which William was 
enabled to grant to his more powerful followers. Two 
hundred manors in Kent with more than an equal 
number elsewhere rewarded the services of his brother 
Odo, and grants almost as large fell to William’s coun- 
sellors Fitz-Osbern and Montgomery or to barons like 
the Mowbrays and the Clares. But the poorest soldier 
of fortune found his part in the spoil. The meanest 
Norman rose to wealth and power in this new dominion 
of his lord. Great or small, each manor thus granted 
was granted on condition of its holder’s service at the 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 123. 


King’s call; a whole army was by this means encamped 
upon the soil; and William’s summons could at any hour 
gather an overwhelming force around his standard. 

Such a force however, effective as it was against the 
conquered English, was hardly less formidable to the 
Crown itself. When once it was established, William 
found himself fronted in his new realm by a feudal baron- 
age, by the men whom he had so hardly bent to his will 
in Normandy, and who were as impatient of law, as 
jealous of the royal power, as eager for an unbridled 
military and judicial independence within their own 
manors, here asthere. The political genius of the -Con- 
queror was shown in his appreciation of this danger and in 
the skill with which he met it. Large as the estates he 
granted were, they were scattered over the country in 
such a way as to render union between the great land- 
owners or the hereditary attachment of great areas of 
population to any one separate lord equally impossible. 
A yet wiser measure struck at the very root of feudalism. 
When the larger holdings were divided by their owners 
into smaller subtenancies, the under-tenants were bound 
by the same conditions of service to their lord as he to 
the Crown. ‘“ Hear, my lord,” swore the vassal as kneel- 
ing bareheaded and without arms he placed his hands 
within those of his superior, “I become liege man of yours 
for life and limb and ‘earthly regard; and [ will keep 
faith and loyalty to you for life and death, God help 
me!’ ‘Then the kiss of his lord invested him with land 
as a “fief” to descend to him and his heirs forever. Ifa 
other countries such a vassal owed fealty to his lord 
against all foes, be they king or no. By the usage how- 
ever which William enacted in England each sub-tenant, 
in addition to his oath of fealty to his lord, swore fealty 
directly to the Crown, and loyalty to the King was thus 
established as the supreme and universal duty of all 
Englishmen. 

But the Conqueror’s skill was shown not so much in 
these inner checks upon feudalism as in the counter- 
balancing forces which he provided without it. He was 
not only the head of the great garrison that held Hugland 


124 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


down, he was legal and elected King of the English 
people. If as Conqueror he covered the country with a 
new military organization, as the suecessor of Eadward 
he maintained the judicial and administrative organization 
of the old English realm. At the danger of a severance 
of the land between the greater nobles he struck a final 
blow by the abolition of the four great earldoms. The 
shire became the largest unit of local government, and in 
each shire the royal nomination of sheriffs for 1ts adminis- 
tration concentrated the whole executive power in the 
King’s hands. The old legal constitution of the country 
gave him.the whole judicial power, and William was 
jealous to retain and heighten this. While he preserved 
the local courts of the hundred and the shire he strength- 
ened the jurisdiction of the King’s Court, which seems 
even in the Confessor’s day to have become more and 
more a court of highest appeal with a right to call up all 
cases from any lower jurisdiction to its bar. The control 
over the national revenue which had rested even in the 
most troubled times in the hands of the King was turned 
into a great financial power by the Conqueror’s system. 
Over the whole face of the land a large part of the 
manors were burdened with special dues to the Crown: 
and it was for the purpose of ascertaining and recording 
these that William sent into each country the commission- 
ers whose enquiries are recorded in his Domesday Book. 
A jury empannelled in each hundred declared on oath 
the extent and nature of each estate, the names, number, 
and condition of its inhabitants, its value before and after 
the Conquest, and sums due from it to the Crown. 
These, with the Danegeld or land-tax levied since the 
days of AXthelred, formed as yet the main financial 
resources of the Crown, and their exaction carried the 
royal authority in its most direct form home to every 
Jandowner. But to these were added a revenue drawn 
from the old Crown domain, now largely increased by the 
confiscations of the Conquest, the ever growing income 
from the judicial “ fines” imposed by the King’s judges 
in the King’s courts, and the fees and redemptions paid 
to the Crown on the grant or renewal of every privilege 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 125 


or charter. A new source of revenue was found in the 
_Jewish traders, many of whom followed William from 
Normandy, and who were glad to pay freely for the royal 
protection which enabled them to settle in their quarters 
or * Jewries’’ in all the principal towns of England. 
William found a yet stronger check on his baronage in 
the organization of the Church. Its old dependence on 
the royal power was strictly enforced. Prelates were 
practically chosen by the King. Homage was exacted 
from bishop as from baron. No royal tenant could be ex- 
communicated save by the King’s leave. No synod could 
legislate without his previous assent and subsequent con- 
firmation of its decrees. No papal letters could be re- 
ceived within the realm save by his permission. The 
King firmly repudiated the claims which were beginning 
to be put forward by the court of Rome. When Gregory 
VII. called on him to do fealty for his kingdom the King 
sternly refused to admit the claim. ‘Fealty I have 
never willed to do, nor will I do it now. I have never 
promised it, nor do I find that my predecessors did it to 
yours.” William’s reforms only tended to tighten this 
hold of the Crown onthe clergy. Stigand was deposed ; 
and the elevation of Lanfranc to the see of Canterbury 
was followed by the removal of most of the English pre- 
lates and by the appointment of Norman ecclesiastics in 
their place. The new archbishop did much to. restore 
discipline, and William’s own efforts were no doubt partly 
directed by a real desire for the religious improvement 
of his realm. But the foreign origin of the new pre- 
lates cut them off from the flocks they ruled and bound 
them firmly to the foreign throne; while their indepen- 
dent position was lessened by a change which seemed in- 
tended to preserve it. Ecclesiastical cases had till now 
been decided, like civil cases, in shire or hundred-court, 
where the bishop sate side by side with ealdorman or 
sheriff. They were now withdrawn from it to the sepa- 
rate courtof the bishop. The change was pregnant with 
future trouble to the Crown ; but for the moment it told 
mainly in removing the bishop from his traditional contact 
with the popular assembly and in effacing the memory 


126 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


of the original equality of the religious with the civil 
power. 

In any struggle with feudalism a national king, secure 
of the support of the Church, and backed by the royal 
hoard at Winchester, stood in different case from the 
merely feudal sovereigns of the Continent. The differ- 
ence of power was seen as soon as the Conquest was fairly 
over and the struggle which William had anticipated 
opened between the baronage and the Crown. The wis- 
dom of his policy in the destruction of the great earldoms 
which had overshadowed the throne was shown in an at- 
tempt at their restoration made in 1075 by Roger, the 
son of his minister William Fitz-Osbern, and by the Bre- 
ton, Ralf de Guader, whom the King had rewarded for 
his services at Senlac with the earldom of Norfolk. The 
rising was quickly suppressed, Roger thrown into prison, 
and Ralf driven over sea. The intrigues of the baronage 
soon found another leader in William’s half-brother, the 
Bishop of Bayeux. Under pretence of aspiring by arms 
to the papacy Bishop Odo collected money and men, but 
the treasure was at once seized by the royal officers and 
the Bishop arrested in the midst of the court. Even at 
the King’s bidding no officer would venture to seize on a 
prelate of the Church, and it was with his own hands 
that William was forced to effect his arrest. The Con- 
queror was as successful against foes from without as 
against foes from within. The fear of the Danes, which 
had so long hung like a thunder-cloud over England, 
passed away before the host which William gathered in 
1085 to meet a great armament assembled by King Cnut. 
A mutiny dispersed the Danish fleet, and the murder of 
its King removed all peril from the North. Scotland, 
already humbled by William’s invasion, was bridled by 
the erection of a strong fortress at Newcastle-upon-Tyne , 
and after penetrating with his army to the heart of Wales 
the King commenced its systematic reduction by settling 
three of its great barons along its frontier. It was not 
till his closing years that William’s unvarying success was 
troubled by a fresh outbreak of the Norman baronage 
under his son Robert and by an attack which he was 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 127 


forced to meet in 1087 from France. Its King mocked 
at the Conqueror’s unwieldy bulk and at the sickness 
which bound him to his bed at Rouen. ‘“ King Wilham 
has as long a lying-in,” laughed Philip, “as a woman 
behind her curtains.” “ WhenI get up,” William swore 
grimly, “I will go to mass in Philip’s-land and bring a 
rich offering for my churching. I will offer a thousand 
candles for my fee. Flaming brands shall they be, and 
steel shall glitter over the fire they make.” At harvest- 
tide town and hamlet flaring into ashes along the French 
border fulfilled the ruthless vow. But as the King rode 
down the steep street of Mantes which he had given to 
the flames his horse stumbled among the embers, and 
William was flung heavily against his saddle. He was 
borne home to Rouen to die. The sound of the minster 
bell woke him at dawn as he lay in the convent of St. 
Gervais, overlooking the city—it was the hour of prime 
—and stretching out his hands in prayer the King passed 
quietly away. Death itself took its color from the sav- 
age solitude of his life. Priests and nobles fled as the 
last breath left him, and the Conqueror’s body lay naked 
and lonely on the floor. 


CHAPTER II. 
THE NORMAN KINGS. 
1085—1154. 


WitH the death of the Conqueror passed the terror 
which had held the barons in awe, while the severance of 
his dominions roused their hopes of successful resistance 
to the stern rule beneath which they had bowed. _Wil- 
liam bequeathed Normandy to his eldest son Robert; but_ 
William the Red, his second son, hastened with his 
father’s ring to England-where the influence of Lanfranc~ 
secured him the crown.— The baronage seized the oppor- 
tunity to rise in arms under pretext of supporting the 
claims of Robert, whose weakness of character gave full 
scope for the growth of feudal independence ; and Bishop 
Odo, now freed from prison, placed himself at the head 
of the revolt. The new King was thrown almost wholly 
on the loyalty..of.his English subjects” But the national 
stamp which William had given to_his kingship.told at 
once. The English rallied to the royal standard ; 
Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, the one surviving Bishop 
of English blood, defeated the insurgents in the West; 
while the King, summoning the freemen of country and 
town to his host under pain of being branded as “nith- 
ing” or worthless, advanced with a large force against 
Rochester where the barons were concentrated. A 
plague which broke out among the garrison forced them— 
to~capitulate, and as the prisoners passed through the 
royal army cries of “ gallows and cord” burst from the 
English ranks. The failure-of-alater conspiracy whose 
aim was to set on the throne a kinsman of the royal 


house, Stephen of Albemarle, with the capture and im- 
(a8) ce MbeitetlicabeDarl re 


° 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 129 


prisonmentof-its—head; Robert Mowbray; the~Eaz! of 
Northumberland, brought home at last_to the baronage 
their helplessness ina strife with the King. The genius 
of the Conqueror had saved England from the danger of 
feudalism. But he had left as weighty a danger in the 
power which trod feudalism under foot. The power of 
the Crown was_a purely personal power, restrained under 
“the Conqueror by his own high sense of duty, but ca- 
pable of becoming a pure despotism-in-the-hands.of. his 
son. The nobles were at his feet, and the policy of his 
“minister, Bishop Flambard of Durham, loaded their es- 
tates with feudal obligations. Each tenant was held as 
bound to appear if needful thrice a° year at the royal 
court, to pay a heavy fine or rent on succession to his 
estate, to contribute aid in case of the King’s capture in 
war or the knighthood of the King’s eldest son or the 
marriage of his eldest daughter. An heir who was still 
a minor passed into the King’s wardship, and all profit 
from his lands went during the period of wardship 
to the King. If the estate fell to an heiress, her hand 
was at the King’s disposal and was generally sold by 
him to the highest bidder. ‘These-rights..oftmasriage ” 
and “ -wardship..as..well asthe exaction of aids atthe 
royal will poured...wealth..into-the..treasury-.while-they» 
impoverished and fettered the.baronage. A fresh source 
of revenue was found in the Church. The same. prin- 
ciples of feudal dependence were applied to its lands as 
to those of the nobles; and during the vacaney of a see 
or abbey its profits, hke those of a minor, were swept 
into the royal hoard. William’s profligacy and extrava- 
gance soon tempted him to abuse this resource, and. so 
steadily did he refuse to appoint successors to prelates 
whom death removed that at the close of his reign one 
archbishopric, four bishoprics, and eleven abbeys were 
found to be without pastors. 

Vile as was this system of extortion and_misrule but a 
single voice was.raised.in.protest.against it. Lanfranc 
had been followed in his abbey at Bec by the most fa- 
mous of his scholars, Anselm of Aosta, an Italian like 
himself. Friends as they were, no two men could be 


130 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


more strangely unlike. Anselm had grown to manhood 
in the quiet solitude of his mountain-valley, a tender- 
hearted poet-dreamer, with a soul pure as the Alpine 
snows above him, and an intelligence keen and clear as 
the mountain-air. The whole temper of the man was 
painted in a dream of his youth. It seemed to him as 
though heaven lay, a stately palace, amid the gleaming 
hill-peaks, while the women reaping in the corn-fields of 
the valley became harvest-maidens of its King. They 
reaped idly, and Anselm, grieved at their sloth, hastily 
climbed the mountain side to accuse them to their lord. 
As he reached the palace the King’s voice called him to 
his feet and he poured forth his tale; then at the royal 
bidding bread of an unearthly whiteness was set before 
him, and he ate and was refreshed. The dream passed 
with the morning ; but the sense of heaven’s nearness to 
earth, the fervid loyalty to the service of his Lord, the 
tender restfulness and peace in the Divine presence 
which it reflected live on in the life of Anselm. Wan- 
dering like other Italian scholars to Normandy, he became 
a monk under Lanfranc, and on his teacher’s removal to 
higher duties succeeded him in the direction of the Ab- 
bey of Bec. No teacher has ever thrown a greater spirit 
of love into his toil. “ Force your scholars to improve !” 
he burst out to another teacher who relied on blows and 
compulsion. “ Did you ever see a craftsman fashion a 
fair image out of a golden plate by blows alone? Does 
he not now gently press it and strike it with his tools, 
now with wise art yet more gently raise and shape 
it? What do your scholars turn into under this cease- 
less beating?” “They turn only brutal,” was the re- 
ply. ‘You have bad luck,” was the keen answer, “in a 
training that only turns men into beasts.” The worst 
natures softened before this tenderness and patience. 
Even the Conqueror, so harsh and terrible to others, be- 
came another man, gracious and easy of speech, with 
Anselm. But amidst his absorbing cares as a teacher, 
the Prior of Bee found time for philosophical specula- 
tions to which we owe the scientific inquiries which built 
up the theology of the middle ages. His famous works 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 131 


were the first attempts of any Christian thinker to elicit 
the idea of God from the very nature of the human rea- 
son. His passion for abstruse thought robbed him of 
food and sleep. Sometimes he could hardly pray. Often 
the night was a long watch till he could seize his con- 
ception and write it on the wax tablets which lay beside 
him. But not even a fever of intense thought such as 
this could draw Anselm’s heart from its passionate ten- 
derness and love. Sick monks in the infirmary could 
relish no drink save the juice which his hand squeezed 
for them from the grape-bunch. In the later days of his 
archbishopric a hare chased by the hounds took refuge 
under his horse, and his gentle voice grew loud as he 
forbade a huntsman to stir in the chase while the crea- 
ture darted off again to the woods. Even the greed of 
lands for the Church to which so many religious men 
yielded found its characteristic rebuke as the battling 
lawyers in such a suit saw Anselm quietly close his 
eyes in court and go peacefully to sleep. 

A sudden impulse of the Red King drew the abbot 
from these quiet studies into the storms of the world. 
The see of Canterbury had long been left without a Pri- 
mate when a dangerous illness frightened the King into 
the promotion of Anselm. The Abbot, who happened 
at the time to be in England on the business of his house, 
was dragged to the royal couch and the cross forced into 
his hands. But William had no sooner recovered from 
his sickness than he found himself face to face with an 
opponent whose meek and loving temper rose into firm- 
ness and grandeur when it fronted the tyranny of the 
King. Much of the struggle between William and the 
Archbishop turned on questions such as the right of in- 
vestiture, which have little bearing on our history, but 
the particular question at issue was of less importance 
than the fact of a contest at all. The boldness of An- 
selm’s attitude not only broke the tradition of ecclesi- 
astical servitude but infused through the nation at large 
a new spirit of independence. The real character of the 
strife appears in the Primate’s answer when his remon- 
strances against the lawless exactions from the Church 


132 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


were met by a demand for a present on his own promo- 
tion, and his first offer of five hundred pounds was con- 
temptuously refused. ‘* Treat me asa free man,’ Anselm 
replied, “‘and I devote myself and all that I have to 
your service, but if you treat me as a slave you shall 
have neither me nor mine.” A burst of the Red King’s 
fury drove the Archbishop from court, and he finally de- 
cided to quit the country, but his example had not been 
lost, and the close of William’s reign found a new spirit 
of freedom in England with which the greatest of the 
Conqueror’s sons was glad to make terms. His exile 
however left William without a check. —Supreme. at 
home, he was full of ambition abroad. As asoldier the 
Red King was litile inferior to his father. “Normandy 
had been pledged*to him by his brother Robert in ex- 
change for asum which enabled the Duke to march in 
the first Crusade for the deliver y of the Holy Land, and 
a rebellion atJue-Mans was subdued by the fierce enerey 
with which William flung himself at the news of it into 
the first boat he found, and crossed the Channel in. face 
ofastorm. ‘ Kings never drown,” he replied contempt. 
uously to the remonstrances of his followers. Homage 
was again wrested from Malcolm by a march tothe Firth 
of Forth, and the subsequent death of. that king threw 
Scotland into~a~ disorder which” enabled-an..army under 
Eadgar Atheling to establish Edgar, the som of: Margaret, 
as an Eneolish feudatory on the throne: In Wales Wal-— 
Tiam-was less triumphant; and the terrible losses inflicted 
on the heavy Norman cavalry in the faStnesses of Snow- 
don forced him’ to~fall back on the slower but wiser 
policy of the Conqueror. But triumph and defeat_alike 
ended in a strange and tragical close. In 1100 the Red. _ 
King was found “dead by peasants in a glade of the New 
Forest, with the arrow~either of a hunter or an” assassin 
in his breast.. 

Robert.was at this moment on his return from the Holy 
Land, where his bravery had redeemed much of his 
earlier ill-fame, and the English crown was seized by his _ 
younger brother Henry in spite of the opposition of the 
baronage, who clung to the Duke of Normandy and the ~ 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214. 133 


union of their estates.on_both.sides.of the Channel under 
a single ruler. Their attitude threw Henry, as it had 
thrown Rufus, on the support of the English, and the two 
great measures which followed his coronation, his grant 
of a charter, and his marriage with Matilda, mark the new 
velation ‘which this support brought about...between.the 
people and their King. Henry’s-Charter is important, 
not merely as a direct precedent for the Great Charter of 
John, but as the first limitation on the despotism éstab- 
hehe Wie @onaueity nad canst te viel a height by 
his son. The “eyil customs” by which the Red King 
had enslaved and plundered the Church were explicitly 
d in it, the unlimited demands made by both the 
Conqueror and“his.son_on the baronage exchanged for 
customary fees, while the rights of the people itself; 
though recosnized more vaguely, were tot™forgotten. 
The barons were held to do justice to their under-tenants 
and to renounce tyrannical exactions from them, the. 
promisingto_restore order andthe ‘law of Ead ward,” 
the old constitution of the realm, with théchanges which 
his father had introduced. His marriage gave a sig- 
nificance to these promises.swhich the meanest™Engtish 
peasant could understand. Edith, or Matilda, was the 
daughter of King Malcolm of Scotland and of Margaret, 
the sister of Eadgar AXtheling. She had been brought 
up in the nunnery of Romsey by its abbess, her aunt 
Christina, and the veil which she had taken there formed 
an obstacle to ler union with the King which was only 
removed by the wisdom of_Anselm. While Flambard, 
the embodiment of the Red King’s despotism, was thrown 
into the Tower, the Archbishop’s recall-had been one of 
Henry’s first acts after his accession. Matilda appeared 
before his court to tell her tale in words of passionate 
earnestness. She had been veiled in her childhood, she 
asserted, only to save her from the insults of the rude 
soldiery who infested the land, had flung the veil from 
her again and again, and had yielded at last to the un- 
womanly taunts, the actual blows of her aunt. ‘As 
often as I stood in her presence,” the girl pleaded, “I 
wore the veil, trembling as I wore it with indignation and 


134 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


grief. But as soon as I could get out of her sight I used 
to snatch it from my head, fling it on the ground, and 
trample it under foot. That was the way, and none 
other, in which I was veiled.” Anselm at once declared 
her free from conventual bonds, and the shout of the 
English multitude when he sat the crown on Matilda’s 
brow drowned the murmur of Churchman or of baron. 
The mockery of the Norman nobles, who nicknamed the 
King and his spouse Godric and Godgifu, was lost’ in the 
joy of the people at large. For the first time since the 
Conquest an English sovereign sat on the English throne. 
The blood of Cerdie and Allfred was to blend itself with 
that of Rolf and the Conqueror. Henceforth it was im- 
possible that the two peoples should remain parted from 
each other; so quick indeed was their union that the very 
name of Norman had passed away in half a century, and 
at the accession of Henry’s grandson it was impossible to 
distinguish between the descendants of the conquerors 
and those of the conquered at Senlac. 

Charter and®marriage roused an enthusiasm among his 
subjects which enabled Henry to defy the claims of~his.. 
brother and the disaffection of his nobles» Early im-4401 
Robert landed at Portsmouth to-win-the crown in arms. 
The great barons with hardly an exception stood aloof 
from the king. -But the Norman Duke found himself 
face_to_face with an English army which gathered™at 
Anselm’s summons round Henry’s standard. The tem- 
per of the English had rallied from the panic of Senlac. 
The soldiers who came to fight for their King ‘nowise 
feared the Normans.” As Henry rode along their tines 
showing them how to keep firm their shield-wall against 
the lances of Robert’s knighthood, he was met with 
shouts for battle. But King and Duke alike shrank from 
a contest in which the victory of either side would have 
undone the Conqueror’s work. ‘The one saw his effort 
was hopeless, the other was only anxious to remove his 
rival from the realm, and by.a peace. which the.Count of 
Meulan negotiated Robert recognized Henry as King of 
England while Henry gave up his fief in’the Cotentin to 
his brother the Duke: Robert’s retreat left Henry-free 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 135 


to deal sternly with the barons who had forsaken him. 
Robert de Lacy was stripped of his manors in Yorkshire ; 
Robert Malet was driven from his lands in Suffolk; Ivo 
of Grantmesnil lost his vast estates and went to the Holy 
Land as a pilgrim. But greater even than these was 
Robert of Belesme, the son of Roger of Montgomery, who 
held in England the earldoms of Shrewsbury and Arun- 
del, while in Normandy he was Count of Ponthieu and 
Alengon. Robert stood at the head of the baronage in 
wealth and power: and his summons to the King’s Court 
to answer for his refusal of aid to the King was answered 
by a haughty defiance. But again the Norman baronage — 
had to feel the strength which English loyalty gave to 
the Crown. Sixty thousand Englishmen followed Henry 
to the attack of Robert’s strongholds along the Welsh 
border. It was in vain that the nobles about the King, 
conscious that Robert’s fall left them helpless in Henry’s 
hands, strove to bring about a peace. The English 
soldiers shouted ‘“ Heed not these traitors, our lord King 
Henry,” and with the people at his back the King stood 
firm. Only an early surrender saved Robert’s life. He was 
suffered to retire to his estates in Normandy, but his 
English lands were confiscated to the Crown. | “ Reioice, 
King Henry,” shouted the English soldiers, “ for you be- 
gan to be afree King on that day when you conquered 
Robert of Belesme and drove him from the land.” Master 
of his own realm and enriched by the confiscated lands 
of the ruined barons Henry crossed into Normandy, 
where the misgovernment of the Duke had alienated the 
clergy and tradesfolk, and where the outrages of nobles 
like Robert of Belesme forced the more peaceful classes 
to call the King to their aid. In_1106 his forces met 
those of his brother on the field of. Tenchebray, and a de- 
‘isive English victory on Norman soil avenged the shame 
of Hastings. The conquered duchy became a dépen- 
dency of the English crown, and Henry’s..energies were 
frittered away through a quarter ofa century in crushing 
its revolts, the hostility of the French, and the efforts of 
his nephew William the™son of Robert, to-regaiti the 
crown which his father had lost. 


156 HISTORY’ OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


With the victory of Tenchebray Henry was free to 
enter on that work of administration which was to make 
his reign memorable in our history. Successful as his 
wars had been he was in heart no warrior but a statesman, 
and his greatness showed itself less in the field. than in 
the council chamber. His outer bearing like his inner 
temper stood in-marked contrast to that of his father. 
Well read, accomplished, easy and fluent of speech, the 
lord of a harem of mistresses, the centre of a gay court 
where poet and jongleur found a home, Henry remained 
cool, self-possessed, clear-sighted, hard, methodical, love- 
less himself, and_neither seeking nor desiring his people’s 
love, but wringing from them their gratitude and regard 
by sheer dint of good government. His work oforder 
was necessarily a costly work: and the steady pressure 
of his taxation, a pressure made the harder by local famines 
and plagues during his reign, has left traces of the grum- 
bling it roused in the pages of the English Chronicle. 
But even the Chronicler is forced to.own amidst his, ¢rum- 
blings that Henry ‘‘ was-a good man, and-great was the 
awe of him.” He had little of his father’s creative genius, 
of that far-reaching originality by which the Conqueror 
stamped himself and his will on the very fabric of our 
history. But he had the passion for order, the love of 
justice, the faculty of organization, the power of steady 
and unwavering rule, which was "needed to complete the 
Conqueror’s work. ~“Hisaim was peace, and the title of the 
Peace-lovinge~King which was given him at his death™ 
showed with what steadiness and constancy he carried out 
his aim. In Normandy indeed his work was ever and anon 
undone by outbreaks of its baronage, outbreaks sternly 
repressed only that the work might be patiently and 
calmly taken up again where it had been broken off. But 
in England his will was carried out. with a perfect suc- 
cess. Formorethan-a quarter-of-a century theland-had 
rest. Without, the Scots were held in friendship, the 
Welsl were bridled by a steady and well-planned scheme 

of gra (ual conquest. Within, the licence of the baronage 
was Paldsternly down, and justice secured for all. ‘ He 
gove’ ied with a strong hand,” says Orderic, but the 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 187 


strong hand was that of a king not of a tyrant... “ Great 

was the awe ot him,”’ writes the annalist of Peterborough. 

* No man durst ill-do to another in ‘his days. Peace he 

made for man and beast.” Pitiless as were the blows he 
aimed at the nobles who withstood him, they were blows 

which his English subjects felt to be struck in their cause. 

“ While he mastered by policy the foremost counts and 

lords and the boldest tyrants, he ever cherished and 

protected peaceful men and men of religion and men ot 

the middle class.” What impressed observers most was 

the unswerving, changeless temper of hisrule. The stern 

justice, the terrible punishments he inflicted on all who 
broke his laws, were parts of a fixed system which differed 

widely from the capricious severity of a mere despot. 

Hardly less impressive was his unvarying success. Heavy 

as were the blows which destiny levelled at him, Henry 

bore and rose unconquered from all. To the end of his life 

the proudest barons lay bound and blinded in his prison. 

His hoard grew greater and greater. Normandy, toss as 

she might, lay helpless at his feet to the last. In England 

it was only after his death that men dared mutter what 

evil things they had thought of Henry the Peace-lover, of 
censure the pitilessness, the greed, and-the-lust-which had — 
blurred-the wisdom and splendor of his rule_/ 

His vigorous admipistration carried out into detail the 
system of government which the Conqueror had sketched. 
The vast estates which had fallen to the crown through 
revolt and forfeiture were granted out to new men de- 
pendent on royal favor. On_ the ruins of the great 
feudatories whom he had crushed Henry built up.a.class 
of lesse® nobles, whom the older barons of the Conquest 
looked down on in scorn, but who were strong enough 
to form a counterpoise to their influence while they. fu:- 
hished the Crown with a class of useful.administrators 
whom Henry employed as his sheriffs and judges. A new 
organization of justice and finance bound the kingdom ~ 
more tightly together in Henry’s grasp. The Clerks of 
the Royal Chapel.were formed-into.a.body of secretaries 
or royal ministers, .whose.head.bore.the title of Chancellor. _ 
Above them stood the Justiciar, or Lieutenant-General of 


138 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 


the kingdom, who in the frequent absence of the King 
acted as Regent of the realm, and whose staff, selected 
from the barons connected with the royal household, were 
formed into a Supreme Court of the realm. The.King’s 
‘Court, as this was called, permanently represented.the_. 
whole-court..of. royal -vassals--which~-had-hitherto—been 
summoned thrice in the year. As the royal council, it 
revised and registered laws, and its “‘ counsel and consent,’ 
though mer ely formal, preserved the principle of the older - 
popular legislation. As a court of justice it formed the 
highest court of appeal ; it could call up any suit from a 
lower tribunal on the application of a suitor, while the 
union of several sheriffdoms under some of its members 
connected it closely with the local courts. As a financial 
body, its chief work lay in the assessment and collection 
of the revenue. In this capacity it took the name of the 
Court of Exchequer from the checkered table, much like 
a chess-board, at which it sat and on which accounts were 
rendered. In their financial capacity its justices became 
‘“‘ barons of the Exchequer.” Twice every year the sheriff 
of each county appeared before these barons and rendered 
the sum of the fixed rent from royal domains, the Dane- 
geld or land tax, the fines of the local courts, the feudal 
aids from the baronial estates, which formed the chief part 
of the royal revenue. Local disputes respecting these 
payments or the assessment of the town-rents were settled 
by a detachment of barons from the court who made the 
circuit of the shires, and whose fiscal visitations led to the 
judicial visitations, the ‘judges’ circuits,” which still 
form so marked a feature in our legal system. 

Measures such as these changed the whole temper of 
the Norman rule. It remained a despotism, but from this 
moment it was a despotism regulated and held in check by 
the forms of administrative routine. Heayy as was the tax. 
ation under Henry the First, terrible as was the suffering 
throughout his reign from famine and plague, the peace 
and order which his government secured through thirty > 
years won a rest for “the Jand in which conqueror and 
conquered blended into a_single-people and in which.this 
people slowly moved forward to a new freedom. But while 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 139 


England thus rested in peace a terrible blow broke the 
fortunes of her King. In 1120 his son, William the 
“« Aitheling,” with a crowd of nobles accompanied Henry 
on his return from Normandy; but the White ship in 
which he embarked lingered behind the rest of the royal 
fleet till the guards of the King’s treasure pressed its 
departure. It had hardly cleared the harbor when the 
ship’s side struck on a rock, and in an instant it sank 
‘beneath the waves. Qne terrible cry, ringing through the 
silence of the night, was heard by the royal fleet; but 
it was not till the morning that the fatal news reached the 
King. Stern as he was, Henry fell senseless to the ground — 
and rose never to smile again... He had iio-otheison, and 
the circlé of his foreign foes closed round him the more 
fiercely that William, ‘the son of his captive brother Robert__ 
was now his natural heir. Henry hated William while he 
loved his own daughter Maud, who had been married to 
the Emperor Henry the Fifth, but who had been restored 
by his death to her father’s court. The succession of a 
woman was new in English history; it was strange to a 
feudal baronage. But when all hope of issue from a second 
wife whom he-wedded was over Henry forced priests and 
nobles to swear allegiance to Maud as their future mistress, . 
and affianced her to Geoffry. the. Handsome,.the_son..of 
the.one foe whom.he-dreaded;-Count’Fulk-of Anjou. 
he marriage of Matilda was buta step in the wonder- 
ful history by which the descendants of a Breton woodman 
became masters not of Anjou only, but of Touraine, 
Maine, and Poitou, of Gascony and Auvergne, of Acqui- 
taine and Normandy, and sovereigns at last of the great 
realm which Normandy had won The legend of the father 
of their races carry us back to the times of our own 
/Efred, when the Danes were ravaging along Loire as they 
ravaged along Thames. In the heart of the Breton 
border, in the debateable land between France and 
Britanny, dwelt Tortulf the Forester, half-brigand, half- 
hunter as the gloomy days went, living in free outlaw- 
fashion in the woods about Rennes. ‘Tortulf had learned 
in his rough forest school “ how to strike the foe, to sleep 
on the bare ground, to bear hunger and toil, summer's 


140 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


heat and winter’s frost, how to fear nothing save ill- 
fame.” Following King Charles the Bald in ‘his struggle 
with the Danes, the woodman won broad lands along 
Loire, and his son Ingelger, who had swept the North- 
men from Touraine and the land to the west, which they 
had burned and wasted into a vast solitude, became the 
first Count of Anjou. But the tale of Tortulfand Ingel- 
ger is a mere creation of some twelfth century jongleur. 
The earliest Count whom history recognizes is Fulk the 
Red. Fulk attached himself to the Dukes of France who 
were now drawing nearer to the throne, and in 888 re- 
ceived from them in guerdon the western portion of 
Anjou which lay across the Mayenne. The story of his 
son isa story of peace, breaking like a quiet idyll the 
war-storms of his house. Alone of his race Fulk the 
Good waged no wars: his delight was to sit in the choir 
of Tours and to be called Canon.” One Martinmas eve 
Fulk was singing there in clerkly guise when the 
French King, Lewis d’Outremer, entered the church. 
“ He sings like a priest,” laughed the King as his nobles 
pointed mockinely to the figure of the Count-Canon. But 
Fulk was ready with his reply. “ Know, my lord,” wrote 
the Count of Anjou, * that‘a King unlearned is a crowned 
ass.” Fulk was in fact no priest, but a busy ruler, gov- 
erning, enforcing peace, and carrying justice to every 
corner of the wasted land. ‘To him alone of his race men 
gave the title of “ the Good.” 

Hampered by revolt, himself in character little more 
than a bold, dashing soldier, Fulk’s son, Geoffry Grey- 
gown, sank almost into a vassal of his powerful neighbors, 
the Counts of Blois and Champagne. But this vassalage 
was roughly shaken off by his successor. Fulk Nerra, 
Fulk the Black, is the greatest of the Angevins, the first 
in whom we cau trace that marked type of character 
which their house was to preserve through two hundred 
years. He was without natural affection. In his youth 
he burnt a wife at the stake, and legend told how he led 
her to her doom decked out in his gayest attire. In 
his old age he waged his bitterest war-against his son, and 
exacted from him when vanquished a humiliation which 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. . 1071—1214. 141 


men reserved for the deadliest of their foes. “You are 
conquered, you are conquered !”’ shouted the old man in 
fierce exultation, as Geoffry, bridled and saddled like a 
beast of burden, crawled for pardon to his father’s feet. 
In Fulk first appeared that low type of superstition which 
startled even. superstitious ages in the early Plantagenets. 
Robber as he was of Church lands, and contemptuous of 
ecclesiastical censures, the fear of the end of the world 
drove Fulk to the Holy Sepulchre. . Barefoot and with 
the strokes of the scourge falling heavily on his shoulders 
the Count had himself dragged by a halter through the 
streets of Jerusalem, and courted the doom of martyrdom 
by his wild outcries of penitence. He rewarded the fidel- 
ity of Herbert of Le Mans, whose aid saved him from utter 
ruin, by entrapping him into captivity and robbing him 
of hislands. He secured the terrified friendship of the 
French King by despatching twelve assassins to cut down 
before his eyes the minister who had troubled it. Familiar 
as the age was with treason and rapine and blood, it re- 
coiled from the cool cynicism of his crimes, and believed 
the wrath of Heaven to have been revealed against the 
union of the worst forms of evilin Fulk the Black. But 
neither the wrath of Heaven nor the curses of men broke 
with a single mishap the fifty years of his success. 

At his accession in 987 Anjou was the least important 
of the greater provinces of France. At his death in 1040 
it stood, if not in extent, at least in real power, first 
among them all. Cool-headed, clear-sighted, quick to 
resolve, quicker to strike, Fulk’s. career was one long 
series of victories over all his rivals. He was a consum- 
mate general, and he had the gift of personal. bravery, 
which was denied to some of his greatest descendants. 
There was a moment in the first of his battles when the 
day seemed lost for Anjou, a feigned retreat of. the 
Bretons drew the Angevin horsemen into a line of hidden 
pitfalls, and the Count himself was flung heavily to the 
ground, Dragged from the.medley of men and horses, 
he swept down almost singly on the foe ‘as a storm- 
wind” (so rang the peean of the Angevins) “sweeps down 
on the thick corn-rows,” and the field was won. But to 


142 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


these qualities of the warrior he added a power of politi- 
cal organization, a capacity for far-reaching combinations. 
a faculty of statesmanship, which became the heritage of 
his race, and lifted them as high above the intellectual 
level of the rulers of their time as their shameless wicked- 
ness degraded them below the level of man. His over- 
throw of Britanny on the old field of Conquereux was 
followed by the gradual absorption of Southern Touraine; 
a victory at Pontlevoi crushed the rival house of Blois ; 
the seizure of Saumur completed his conquests in the 
south, while Northern Touraine was won bit by bit till 
only Tours resisted the Angevin. The treacherous 
seizure of its Count, Herbert Wakedog, left Maine at his 
mercy. 

His work of conquest was completed by his son. 
Geoffry Martel wrested Tours from the Count of Blois, 
and by the seizure of La Mans brought his border to the 
Norman frontier. Here however his advance was checked 
by the genius of William the Conqueror, and with his 
death the greatness of Anjou came for a while to an end. 
Stripped of Maine by the Normans and broken by dis- 
sensions within, the weak and profligate ruler of Fulk 
Rechin ‘left Anjou powerless. But in 1109 it woke to 
fresh energy with the accession of his son, Fulk of erusa- 
lem. Now urging the turbulent Norman nobles to revolt, 
now supporting Robert’s son, William, and his strife with 
his uncle, offering himself throughout as the loyal sup- 
porter of the French kingdom which was now hemmed in 
onalmost every side by the forces of the English king and 
of his allies the Counts of Blois and Champagne, Fulk 
was the one enemy whom Henry the First really feared. 
It was to disarm his restless hostility that the King gave 
the hand of Matilda to Geoffry the Handsome. But the 
hatred between Norman and Angevin had been too bitter 
to make such a marriage popular, and the secrecy with 
which it was brought about was held by the barons to 
free them from the oath they had previously sworn. As 
no baron if he was sonless could give a husband to his 


daughter save with his lord’s consent, the nobles held by 
a strained analogy that their own assent was needful to — 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 143 


the marriage of Maud. Henry found a more pressing 
danger in the greed of her husband Geoffry, whose habit 
of wearing the common broom of Anjou, the planta 
genista, in his helmet gave him the title of Plantagenet. 
His elaim ended at last in intrigues with the Norman 
nobles, and Henry hurried to the border to meet an 
Angevin invasion; but the plot broke down at his 
presence, the Angevins retired, and at the close of 1135 
the old King withdrew to the Forest of Lyon to die. 

“God give him,” wrote the Archbishop of Rouen 
from Henry’s death-bed, “the peace he loved.” With 
him indeed closed the long peace of the Norman rule. | 
An outburst of anarchy followed on the news of his de- 
parture, and in the midst of the turmoil Earl Stephen, 
his nephew,.appeared_ at the gates of London. Stephen 
was.a son.of the Conqueror’s daughter, Adela, who had 
married—a~-CGount~of-Blois.;. he had been brought. up at 
the English-court,-had-been..made._Count—of.Mortain by 
_Henry,-had- become Count-of-Boulogne by his marriage, 
and as head of the Norman baronage had been_ the first 
to pledge himse!f.to support Matilda’s succession. But 
his own claim as nearest male heir of the Conqueror’s 
blood (for his cousin, the son of Robert, had fallen some 
years before in Flanders) was supported by his personal 
popularity ; mere swordsman as he was, his good-humor, 
his generosity, his very prodigality made Stephen a. fa- 
vorite with all. No noble however had as yet ventured 
to join him nor had any town opened its gates when 
London poured out to meet him with uproarious wel- 
come. Neither baron nor prelate was present to consti- 
tute a National Council, but the great.city-did-net- hesi- 
tate to take their place. The voice of her citizens had 
lorge—been_accepted.as representative of the -popular 
assent in the election of a king; but it marks the pro- 
gress of English independence under Henry that London 
now claimed of itself the right of election. Undismayed 
by the absence of the hereditary counsellors of the crown 
its ‘* Aldermen and wise folk gathered together the folk- 
moot, and these providing at their own will for the good 
of*the realm unanimously resolved to choose a king.” The 


144 . HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


solemn deliberation ended in the choice of Stephen, the 
citizens swore to defend the King with money and blood, 
Stephen swore to apply his whole strength to the pacifica- 
tion and good government of the realm. It was in fact 
the new union of conquered and conquerors into a single 
England that did Stephen’s work. The succession of 
Maud meant therule of Geoffry of Anjou, and to Norman 
as to Englishman the rule of the Angevin was a foreign 
rule. The welcome Stephen won at London and Win- 
chester, his seizure of the royal treasure, the adhesion of 
the Justiciar Bishop Roger to his cause, the reluctant 
consent of the Archbishop, the hopelessness of aid from 
Anjou, where Geoffry was at this moment pressed by 
revolt, the need above all of some king to meet the out- 
break of anarchy which followed Henry’s death, secured 
Stephen the voice of the baronage. He was crowned at 
Christmas-tide ; and soon joined by Robert Earl of Glou- 
cester, a bastard son of Henry and the chief of his nobles; 
while the issue of a charter from Oxford in 1136, a 
charter which renewed the dead King’s pledge of good 
government, promised another Henry to the realm. ‘The 
charter surrendered all forests madeim-thedast reign as 
a sop to the nobles, it conciliated the Church by grant- 
ing freedom of election and renouncing all right to the 
profits of vacant churches, it won the people by a pledge 
to abolish the tax of Danegeld. 

The king’s first two years were years of success. and 
prosperity. Two risings of barons in.the-east—and_west 
were easily put down, and in 1137.Stephen.passed into 


a 


Normandy and-secured-the Duchy againstan attack from 
Anjou. But already the elements of trouble were gather- 
ing round him. Stephen was a mere soldier, with few 
kingly. qualities..save--that..of .a..soldier’s bravery ; and 
the realm soon began to slip from his grasp. He turned 
against himself the jealous dread of foreigners to which 
he owed his accession by.surrounding himself with hired 
knights..from Flanders; he drained ~the-treasury by 
ereating new earls endowed with pensions from it, and — 
recruited his‘means by base coinage. His consciousness — 
of the gathering storm only drove Stephen. to bind his 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 145 


friends to him by suffering them to fortify castles and to 
renew the feudal tyranny which Henry had struck down. 
But the long reign of the dead king had left the Crown 
so strong that even yet Stephen could hold his own. A 
plot which Robert of Gloucester had been weaving from 
the outset of his reign came indeed to a head in 1188, and 
the Earl’s revolt stripped Stephen of Caen and half Nor- 
mandy. But when his partisans in England rose in the 
south and the west and the King of Scots, whose friend- 
ship Stephen had bought in the opening of his reign by 
the cession of Carlisle, poured over the northern border, 
the nation stood firmly by the King. Stephen himself. 
marched on the western rebels and soon left them few 
strongholds save Bristol. His people fought for him in 
the north. The pillage and cruelties of the wild tribes 
of Galloway and the Highlands roused the spirit of the 
Yorkshiremen. Baron and freeman gathered at York 
round Archbishop Thurstan and marched to the field of 
Northallerton to await the foe. The sacred banners of 
St. Cuthbert of Durham, St. Peter of York, St. John of 
Beverley, and St. Wilfred of Ripon hung from a pole 
fixed in a four-wheeled car which stood in the centre of 
the host. The first onset of David’s host was a terrible 
one. “I who wear no armor,” shouted the chief of the 
Galwegians, “will go as far this day as any one with 
breastplate of mail; ” his men charged with wild shouts 
of “ Albin, Albin,” and were followed by the Norman 
knighthood of the Lowlands. But their repulse was 
complete ; the fierce hordes dashed in vain against the 
close English ranks around the Standard, and the whole 
army fled in confusion to Carlisle. 

Weak indeed as Stephen was, the administrative organi- 
zation of Henry still did its work. Roger remained 
justiciar, his son was chancellor, his nephew Nigel, the 
Bishop of Ely, was treasurer. Finance and justice were 
thus concentrated in the hands of a single family which 
preserved amidst the deepening misrule something of the 
old order and rule, and which stood at the head of the 
‘new men,” whom Henry had raised into importance and 
made the instruments of his will. These new men were 


146 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


still weak by the side of the older nobles ; and conscious 
of the jealousy and ill-will with which they were regarded 
they followed in self-defence the example which the 
barons were setting in building and fortifying castles on 
their domains. Roger and his housé;the~objects=from 
their official position of a deeper grudge than any, were 
carried away by the panic. ‘The justiciar and his son 
fortified their castles, and it was only with a strong force 
at their back that the prelates appeared at court. Their 
attitude was one to rouse Stephen’s jealousy, and the | 
news of Matilda’s purpose of invasion lent strength to the 
doubts which the nobles cast on their fidelity. All the 
weak violence of the King’s temper suddenly broke out. 
He seized Roger the Chancellor and the Bishop of Lin- 
coln when they appeared at Oxford in June, 1139, and 
forced them to surrender their strongholds. Shame broke 
the justiciar’s heart; he died at the close of the year, and 
his nephew Nigel of Ely was driven from the realm, But 
the fall of this house shattered the whole system of gov- 
ernment. The King’s court and the Exchequer ceased 
to work at a moment when the landing of Earl Robert 
and the Empress Matilda set Stephen face to face with a 
danger greater than he had yet encountered, while the 
clergy alienated by the arrest of the Bishops and the dis- 
regard of their protests, stood angrily aloof. 

The three bases-of-Henry’s.system.of government, the. 
subjection of the baronage to the law, the good-will of 
the Church, and the organization of justice and finance, 
were now utterly ruined : ; and for the seventeen years 
which passed from this hour to the Treaty of Walling-~ 
ford England was given up to the miseries of civil war. 
The country was divided between the adherents of the 
two rivals, the West supporting Matilda, London and 
and the East Stephen. A defeat at Lincoln in 1141 left 
the latter a captive in the hands of his enemies, while 
Matilda was received throughout the land as its “ Lady.” 
But the disdain with which she repulsed the claim of Lon- 
don to the enjoyment of its older privileges called its 
burghers to arms; her resolve to hold Stephen a prisoner 
roused his party again to life, and she was driven to Ox- 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 147 


ford to be besieged there in 1142 by Stephen himself, 
who had obtained his release in exchange for Earl Robert 
after the capture of the Earl in a battle at Devizes. She 
escaped from the castle, but with the death of Robert her 
struggle became a hopeless one, and in 1146 she withdrew 
to Normandy. The war was now a mere chaos of pillage 
and bloodshed. ‘The.royal power came to an end. The 
royal.courts were suspended, for.not a baron-or~bishop 
would come at the King’s call...The bishops mét in™ 
council to protest, but their protests and excommunica- 
tions fell on deafened ears. For the first and last time 
in her history England was in the hands of the baronage, 
and their outrages showed from what horrors the stern 
rule of the Norman Kings had saved her. Castles sprang 
up everywhere: ‘“ They filled the land with castles,” 
says the terrible annalist of the time. ‘“ They greatly 
oppressed the wretched people by making them work at 
these castles, and when they were finished they filled 
them with devils and armed men.” In each of these 
robber-holds a petty tyrant ruled like aking, The strife 
for the Crown had broken into a medley of feuds between 
baron and baron, for none could brook an equal or a su- 
perior in his fellow. ‘“ They fought among themselves 
with deadly hatred, they spoiled the fairest lands with 
fire and rapine; in what had been the most fertile of 
counties they destroyed almostall the provision of bread.” 
For fight as they might with one another, all were at one 
in the plunder of the land. Towns were put to ransom. 
Villages were sacked and burned. All who were deemed 
to have goods, whether men or women, were carried off 
anc flung into dungeons and tortured till they yielded 
up their wealth. No ghastilier picture of a nation’s 
misery has ever been painted than that which closes the 
English Chronicle whose last acceuts falter out amidst 
the horrors of the time. “They hanged up men by their 
feet and smoked them with foul smoke. Some were 
hanged up by their thumbs, others by the head, and burn- 
ing things were hung on to their feet. They put knotted 
strings about men’s heads, and writhed them till they 
went to the brain. They put men into prisons where 


148 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


adders and snakes and toads were crawling, and so they 
tormented them, Some they put into a chest short and 
narrow and not deep and that had sharp stones within, 
and forced men therein so that they broke all their limbs. 
In many of the castles were hateful and grim things 
called rachenteges, which two or three men had enough 
to do to carry. It was thus made; it was fastened to a 
beam and had a sharp iron to go about a man’s neck and 
throat, so that he might noways sit, or lie, or sleep, but 
he bore all the iron. Many thousands they starved with 
hunger.” 

It was only after years of this feudal anarchy that 
England was rescued from it by the efforts of the Church. 
The political influence of the Church had been greatly 
lessened by the Conquest: for pious, learned, and ener- 
getic as the bulk of the Conqueror’s bishops were, they 
were not Englishmen. ‘Till the reign of Henry the First 
no Englishman occupied an English see. The sever- 
ance of the higher clergy from the lower priesthood 
and from the people went far to paralyze the constitu- 
tional influence of the Church. Anselm stood alone 
against Rufus, and when Anselm was gone no voice of 
ecclesiastical freedom broke the silence of the reign of 
Henry the First. But at the close of Henry’s reign and 
throughout the reign of Stephen England was stirred by 
the first of those great religious movements which it was 
to experience afterwards in the preaching of the Friars, 
the Lollardism of Wyclif, the Reformation, the Puritan 
enthusiasm, and the mission work of the Wesleys. Every- 
where in town and country men banded themselves to- 
gether for prayer: hermits flocked to the woods: noble 
and churl welcomed the austere Cistercians, a reformed 
offshoot of the Benedictine order, as they spread over 
the moors and forests of the North. A new spirit of 
devotion woke the slumbers of the religious houses, and 
penetrated alike to the home of the noble and the trader. 
London took its full share in the revival. The city was 
proud of its religion, its thirteen conventual and more 
than a hundred parochial churches. The new impulse 
changed its very aspect. In the midst of the city Bishop 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 149 


Richard busied himself with the vast cathedral church of 
St. Paul which Bishop Maurice had begun; barges came 
up the river with stones from Caen for the great arches 
that moved the popular wonder, while street and lane 
were being levelled to make room for its famous church- 
yard. Rahere, a minstrel at Henry’s court, raised the 
priory of Saint Bartholomew beside Smithfield. Alfune 
built St. Giles’s at Cripplegate. The old English Cnich- 
tenagild surrendered their soke of Algate as a site for the 
new priory of the Holy Trinity. The tale of this house 
paints admirably the temper of the citizens at the time. 
Its founder, Prior Norman, built church and cloister and 
bought books and vestments in so liberal a fashion that 
no money remained to buy bread. The canons were at 
their last gasp when the city-folk, looking into the refec- 
tory as they passed round the cloister in their usual 
Sunday procession, saw the tables laid but not a single 
loaf on them. ‘ Here isa fine set out,” said the citizens ; 
“but where is the bread to come from?” The women 
who were present vowed each to bring a loaf every Sun- 
day, and there was soon bread enough and to spare for 
the priory and its priests. 

We see the strength of the new movement in the new 
class of ecclesiastics whom it forced on to the stage. Men 
like Archbishop Theobald drew whatever influence they 
wielded from a belief in their holiness of life and unsel- 
fishness of aim. The paralysis of the church ceased as 
the new impulse bound prelacy and people together, and 
at the moment we have reached its power was found 
strong enough to wrest England out of the chaos of 
feudal misrule. In the early part of Stephen’s reign his 
brother Henry, the Bishop of Winchester, who had been 
appointed in 1139 Papal Legate for the realm, had striven 
to supply the absence of any royal or national authority 
by convening synods of bishops, and by asserting the 
moral right of the Church to declare sovereigns unworthy 
of the throne. The compact between king and people 
which became a part of constitutional law in the Charter 
of Henry had gathered new force in the Charter of 
Stephen, but its legitimate consequence in the responsi 


150 HISTORY .OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


bility of the crown for the execution of the compact was 
first drawn out by these ecclesiastical councils. From 
their alternate depositions of Stephen and Matilda flowed 
the after depositions of Edward and Richard, and the 
solemn act by which the succession was changed in the 
case of James. Extravagant and unauthorized as their 
expression of it may appear, they expressed the right of a 
nation to good government. Henry of Winchester, “ half 
monk, half soldier,” as he was called, possessed too little 
religious influence to wield a really spiritual power, and 
it was only at the close of Stephen’s reign that the 
nation really found a moral leader in Theobald, the Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury. Theobald’s ablest agent and ad- 
viser was Thomas, the son of Gilbert Beket, a leading 
citizen and, it is said, Portreeve of London, the site of 
whose house is still marked by the Mercer’s chapel in 
Cheapside. His mother Rohese was a type of the devout 
woman of her day; she weighed her boy every year on 
his birthday against money, clothes, and provisions which 
she gave to the poor. Thomas grew up amidst the Nor- 
man barons and clerks who frequented his father’s house 
with a genial freedom of character tempered by the Nor- 
man refinement; he passed from the school of Merton 
to the University of Paris, and returned to fling himself 
into the life of the young nobles of the time. Tall, hand- 
some, bright-eyed, ready of wit and speech, his firmness 
of temper showed itself in his very sports ; to rescue his 
hawk which had fallen into the water he once plunged 
into a millrace and was all but crushed by the wheel. 
The loss of his father’s wealth drove him to the court of 
Archbishop Theobald, and he soon became the Primate’s 
confidant in his plans for the rescue of England. 

The natural influence which the Primate would have 
exerted was long held in suspense by the superior position 
of Bishop Henry of Winchester as Papal Legate ; but this 
office ceased with the Pope who granted it, and when in 
1150 it was transferred to the Archbishop himself Theo- 
bald soon made his weight felt. The long disorder of the 
realm was producing its natural reaction in exhaustion 
aud disgust, as well as in a general craving for return to 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 151 


the line of hereditary succession whose breaking seemed 
the cause of the nation’s woes. But the growth of their 
son Henry to manhood set naturally-aside the pretensions 
both.of Count Geoffry and Matilda... Young. ashe.was 
Henry already showed the cool long-sighted temper which 
“was to be-his-characteristic on the throne. Foiled in an 
early attempt to grasp the crown, he looked quietly-on 
at the disorder which was doing his work-till the death of 
his_father_at theclose_of 11o\ left iim master of Nor- 
mandy and Anjou. In the spring of the following year 
is marriage with its duchess, Eleanor of Poitou, added ~ 
Acquitaine to his dominions. Stephen saw the gathering 
storm, and strove to meet it. He called on the bishops 
and baronage to secure the succession of his son Eustace 
by consenting to his association with him in the kingdom. 
But the moment was now come for Theobald to play his 
part. He was already negotiating through Thomas of 
London with Henry and the Pope; he met Stephen’s plans 
by a refusal to swear fealty to his son, and the bishops, in 
spite of Stephen’s threats, went with their head. The 
blow was soon followed by a harder one. Thomas, as 
Theobald’s agent, invited Henry to appear in England, 
and though the Duke disappointed his supporters’ hopes 
by the scanty number of men he brought with him in 1153, 
his weakness proved in the end a source of strength. It 
was not to foreigners, men said, that Henry-owed-his_suc- 
cess but.to.the.arms of Englishmen, An English-army 
gathered round him, and as the hosts of Stephen and the 
Duke drew together a battle seemed near which would 
decide the fate of the realm. But Theobald who was now 
firmly supported by the greater barons again interfered 
and forced the rivals to an agreement. ‘To the excited 
partisans of the house of Anjou it seemed as if the nobles 
were simply playing their own game in the proposed set- 
tlement and striving to preserve their power by a balance 
of masters. The suspicion was probably groundless, but 
all fear vanished with the death of Eustace, who rode off 
from his father’s camp, maddened with the ruin of his 
hopes, to die in August, smitten, as men believed, by the 
hand of God for his plunder of abbeys. The ground was 


152 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


now clear, and in November the ‘Treaty of Wallingford 
abolished the evils of the long anarchy. ‘The castles were 
to be razed, the~crown lands resumed, the “foreign mer 
cenaries banished from the country,.and sheriffs appointed 
to.restore order. Stephen was recognized as King, aid 
in turn recognized. Henry as.his heiv...... The Duke réceived 
at Oxford the fealty of the barons, and passed into Nor- 
mandy in the spring of 1154. The work of reformation 
had already begun. Stephen resented indeed the pressure 
which Henry put on him to enforce the destruction of the 
castles built during the anarchy ; but. Stephen’s resistance 
was but the pettish outbreak of a ruined man. He was 
in fact fast drawing to the grave ; and on his death in 
-October 1154 Henry returned to take the crown without ~ 


ouarren If. 
HENRY THE SECOND. 
1154—1189. 


YOUNG as he was, and he had reached but his twenty- 
first year when he returned to England asits King, Henry 
mounted the throne with a purpose of government which 
his reign carried steadily out. His practical, serviceable 
frame suited the hardest worker of his time. There was 
something in his build and look, in the square stout form, 
the fiery face, the close-cropped hair, the prominent eyes, 
the bull neck, the coarse strong hands, the bowed legs, 
that marked out the keen, stirring, coarse-fibred man of 
business. ‘* He never sits down,” said one who observed 
him closely; “he is always on his legs from morning till 
night.’ Orderly in business, careless of appearance, spar- 
ing in diet, never resting or giving his servants rest, chatty, 
inquisitive, endowed with a singular charm of address and 
strength of memory, obstinate in love or hatred, a fair 
scholar, a great hunter, his general air that of a rough, 
passionate, busy man, Henry’s personal character told 
directly on the character of his reign. His accession 
marks the period of amalgamation when neighborhood 
and traffic and intermarriage drew Englishmen and Nor- 
mans into a single people. A national feeling was thus 
springing up before which the barriers of the older feudal- 
ism were to be swept away. Henry had even less rever- 
ence for the feudal past than the men of his day: he was 
indeed utterly without the imagination and reverence 
which enable men to sympathize with any past at all. 
He had a practical man’s impatience of the obstacles 
thrown in the way of his reforms by the older constitu- 
tion of the realm, nor could he understand other men’s 


154 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


reluctance to purchase undoubted improvements by the 
sacrifice of customs and traditions of bygone days. With- 
out any theoretical hostility to the co-ordinate powers of 
the state, it seemed to him a perfectly reasonable and 
natural course to trample either baronage or Church under 
foot to gain his end of good government. He saw clearly 
that the remedy for such anarchy as England had endured 
under Stephen.lay in the establishment. of a kingly rule 
unembarrassed by any privileges of order or class, admin- 
istered by royal servants, and in whose public administra- 
tion the nobles acted simply as delegates of the sovereign. 
His work was to lie in the organization of judicial-and 
administrative reforms which realized this idea. But of 
the currents of thought and feeling which were tending 
in the same direction he knew nothing. What he did 
for the moral and social impulses which were telling on 
men about him was simply to let them alone. Religion 
grew more and more identified with patriotism under the 
eyes of a King who whispered, and scribbled, and looked 
at picture-books during mass, who never confessed, and 
cursed God in wild frenzies of blasphemy. Great peoples 
formed themselves on both sides of the sea round a sove- 
reign who bent the whole force of his mind to hold to- 
gether an Empire which the growth of nationality must 
inevitably destroy. Thereis throughout a tragic grandeur 
in the irony of Henry’s position, that of a Sforza of the 
fifteenth century set in the midst of the twelfth, building 
up by patience and policy and craft a dominion alien to 
the deepest sympathies of his age and fated to be swept 
away in the end by popular forces to whose existence his 
very cleverness and activity blinded him. But whether. 
by the anti-national temper of his general system or by the 
administrative reforms of his English rule his policy did 
more than that of all his predecessors to prepare England. 
for the unity and freedom which the fall of his house was 
to reveal. : 
He had been placed on the throne, as we have seen, by 
the Church. His first work was to repair the evils which 
England had endured tillhis accession by the restoration 
of the system of Henry the first; and it was with the aid 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 155 


and counsel of Theobald that the foreign marauders were 
driven from the realm, the new castle demolished in spite 
of the opposition of the baronage, the King’s Court and 
Exchequer restored. Age and infirmity however warned 
the Primate to retire from the post of minister, and his 
power fell into the younger and more vigorous hands of 
Thomas Beket, who had long acted as his confidential 
adviser and was now made chancellor. Thomas won the 
personal favor of the King. The two young men had, in 
Theobald’s words, “ but one heart and mind;” Henry 
jested in the Chancellor’s hall, or tore his cloak from his 
shoulders in rough horse-play as they rode through the 
streets. He loaded his favorite with riches and honors. 
but there is no’ ground for thinking that Thomas in any 
degree influenced his system of rule. Henry’s policy 
seems for good or evil to have been throughout his own- 
His work of reorganization went steadily on amidst 
troubles at home and abroad. Welsh outbreaks forced 
him in 1157 to lead an army over the border ; and a crush- 
ing repulse showed that he was less skilful as a general 
than as astatesman. The next year saw him drawn across 
the Channel, where he was already master of a third of 
the present France. Anjou and Touraine he bad inherit- 
ed from his father, Maineand Normandy from his mother. 
he governed Britanny through his brother, while the seven 
provinces of the south, Poitou, Saintonge, Auvergne, 
Perigord, the Limousin, the Angoumois, and Guienne, 
belonged to his wife. As Duchess of Aquitaine Eleanor 
had claims on Toulouse, and these Henry prepared ip 
1159 to enforce by arms. But the campaign was turned 
to the profit of his reforms. He had already begun the 
work of bringing the baronage within the grasp of the 
law by sending judges from the Exchequer year after 
year to exact the royal dues and administer the King’s 
justice even in castle and manor. He now attacked its 
military influence. Each man who held lands of a certain 
value was bound to furnish a knight for his lord’s service ; 
and the barons thus held a body of trained soldiers at 
their disposal. When Henry called his chief lords to 
serve in the war of Toulouse he allowed the lower tenants 


156 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


to commute their service for sums payable to the royal 
treasury under the name of “scutage,” or shield-money. 
The “ Great Scutage” did much to disarm the baronage, 
while it enabled the King to hire foreign mercenaries for 
his service abroad. Again however he was luckless in 
war. King Louis of France threw himself into Toulouse. 
Conscious of the ill-compacted nature of his wide domin- 
ion, Henry shrank from an open contest with his suzerain ; 
he withdrew his forces, and the quarrel ended in 1160 by 
a formal alliance and the betrothal of his eldest son to 
the daughter of Louis. 

Henry returned to his English realm to regulate the 
relations of the state with the Church. These rested in 
the main on the system established by the Conqueror, and 
with that system Henry had no wish to meddle. But he 
was resolute that, baron or priest, all should be equal 
before the law; and he had no more mercy for clerical 
than for feudal immunities. The immunities of the clergy 
indeed were becoming a hindrance to public justice. The 
clerical order in the middle ages extended far beyond the 
priesthood ; it included in Henry’s day the whole of the 
professional and educated classes. It was subject to 
the jurisdiction of the church courts alone; but bodily 
punishment could only be inflicted by officers of the lay 
courts, and so great had the jealousy between clergy and 
laity become that the bishops no longer sought civil aid 
but restricted themselves to the purely spiritual punish- 
ments of penance and deprivation of orders. Such 
penalties formed no effectual check upon crime, and while 
preserving the Church courts the King aimed at the de- 
livery of convicted offenders to secular punishment. For 
the carrying out of these designs he sought an agent in 
Thomas the Chancellor. Thomas had now been his 
minister for eight years, and had fought bravely in the war 
against Toulouse at the head of the seven hundred knights 
who formed his household. But the King had other 
work for him than war. On Theobald’s death in 1162 
he forced on the monks of Canterbury his election as 
Archbishop. But from the moment of his appointment 
the dramatic temper of the new Primate flung its whole 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 157 


energy into the part he set himself to play. At the first 
intimation of Henry’s purpose he pointed with a laugh to 
his gay court attire: “ You are choosing a fine dress,” he 
said, “to figure at the head of your Canterbury monks ;”’ 
once monk and Archbishop he passed with a fevered 
earnestness from luxury to asceticism ; and a visit to the 
Council of Tours in 1163, where the highest doctrines of 
ecclesiastical authority was sanctioned by Pope Alex- 
ander the Third, strengthened his purpose of struggling 
for the privileges of the Church. His change of attitude 
encouraged his old rivals at court to vex him with petty 
law-suits, but no breach had come with the King till 
Henry proposed that clerical convicts should be punish- 
ed by the civil power. Thomas refused ; he would only 
consent that a clerk once degraded, should for after of- 
fences suffer like a layman. Both parties appealed to 
the “‘customs”’ of the realm; and it was to state these 
* customs” that a court was held in 1164 at Clarendon 
near Marlborough. 

The report presented by bishops and barons formed 
the Constitutions of Clarendon, a code which in the 
bulk of its provisions simply re-enacted the system of the 
Conqueror. Every election of bishop or abbot was to 
take place before royal officers, in the King’s chapel, and 
with the King’s assent. The prelate elect was bound to 
do homage to the King for his lands before consecration, 
and to hold his lands as a barony from the King, subject 
to all feudal burdens of taxation and attendance in the 
King’s court. No bishop might leave the realm without 
the royal permission. No tenant in chief or royal servant 
might be excommunicated, or their land placed under 
interdict, but by the King’s assent. What was new was 
the legislation respecting ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The 
King’s court was to decide whether a suit between clerk 
and layman, whose nature was disputed, belonged to the 
Church courts or the King’s. <A royal officer was to be 
present at all ecclesiastical proceedings in order to con- 
fine the Bishop’s court within its own due limits, and a 
clerk convicted there passed at once under the civil juris- 
diction. An appeal was left from the Archbishop’s court 


158 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


to the King’s court for defect of justice, but none might 
appeal to the Papal court save with the King’s leave. 
The privilege of sanctuary in churches and churchyards 
was repealed, so far as property and not persons was 
concerned. After a passionate refusal the Primate was 
at last brought to set his seal to these Constitutions, but 
his assent was soon retracted, and Henry’s savage re- 
sentment threw the moral advantage of the position into 
his opponent’s hands. Vexatious charges were brought 
against Thomas, and he was summoned to answer at a 
Council held in the autumn at Northampton. All urged 
him to submit ; his very life was said to be in peril from 
the King’s wrath. But in the presence of danger the 
courage of the man rose to its full height. Grasping his 
archiepiscopal cross he entered the royal court, forbade 
the nobles to condemn him, and appealed in the teeth of 
the Constitutions to the Papal See. Shouts of “ Traitor!” 
followed him as he withdrew. The Primate turned 
fiercely at the word: ‘“ Were Ia knight,” he shouted 
back, “my sword should answer that foul taunt!” 
Once alone however, dread pressed more heavily; he 
fled in disguise at nightfall and reached France through 
Flanders. 

Great as were the dangers it was to bring with it, the 
flight of Thomas left Henry free to carry on the reforms 
he had planned. In spite of denunciations from Primate 
and Pope, the Constitutions regulated from this time the 
relations of the Church with the state. Henry now 
turned to the actual organization of the realm. His 
reign, it has been truly said, “initiated the rule of law” 
as distinct from the despotism, whether personal or tem- 
pered by routine, of the Norman sovereigns. It was by 
successive “ assizes ” or codes issued with the sanction of 
the great councils of barons and prelates which he sum- 
moned year by year, that he perfected in a system of 
gradual reforms the administrative measures which Henry 
the First had begun. The fabric of our judicial legisla- 
tion commences in 1166 with the Assize of Clarendon, 
the first object of which was to provide for the order of 
the realm by reviving the old English system of mutual 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 159 


security orfrankpledge. No stranger might abide in any 
place save a borough and only there for a single night 
unless sureties were given for his good behavior; and 
the list of such strangers was to be submitted to the 
itinerant justices. In the provisions of this assize for the 
repression of crime we find the origin of trial by jury, 
so often attributed to earlier times. Twelve lawful men 
of each hundred, with four from each township, were 
sworn to present those who were known or reputed as 
criminals within their district for trial by ordeal. The 
jurors were thus not merely witnesses, but sworn to act 
as judges also in determining the value of the charge, 
and it is this double character of Henry’s jurors that has 
descended to our “grand jury,” who still remain charged 
with the duty of presenting criminals for trial after ex- 
amination of the witnesses against them. Two later 
steps brought the jury to its modern condition. Under 
Edward the First witnesses acquainted with the partic- 
ular fact in question were added in each case to the 
general jury, and by the separation of these two classes 
of jurors at a later time the last became simply “ wit- 
nesses ” without any judicial power, while the first ceased 
to be witnesses at all and became our modern jurors, 
who are only judges of the testimony given. With this 
assize too a practice which had prevailed from the earliest 
English times, the practice of “ compurgation,” passed 
away. Under this system the accused could be acquitted 
of the charge by the voluntary oath of his neighbors and 
kinsmen ; but this was abolished by the Assize of Clar- 
endon, and for the fifty years which followed it his trial, 
after the investigation of the grand jury, was found solely 
in the ordeal or “ judgment of God,” where innocence 
was proved by the power of holding hot iron in the hand 
or by sinking when flung into the water, for swimming 
was a proof of guilt. It was the abolition of the whole 
system of ordeal by the Council of Lateran in 1216 which 
led the way to the establishment of what is called a 
“petty jury” for the final trial of prisoners. 

But Henry’s work of reorganization had hardly begun 
when it was broken by the pressure of the strife with 


160 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the Primate. For six years the contest raged bitterly ; 
at Rome, at Paris, the agents of the two powers intrigued 
against each other. Henry stooped to acts of the mean- 
est persecution in driving the Primate’s kinsmen from 
England, and in confiscating the lands of their order till 
the monks of -Pontigny should refuse Thomas a home; 
while Beket himself exhausted the patience of his friends 
by his violence and excommunications, as well as by the 
stubbornness with which he clung to the offensive clause 
“Saving the honor of my order,” the addition of which 
to his consent would have practically neutralized the 
King’s reforms. The Pope counselled mildness, the 
French king for a time withdrew his support, his own 
clerks gave way at last. ‘Come up,” said one of them 
bitterly when his horse stumbled on the road, “saving 
the honor of the Church and my order.” But neither 
warning nor desertion moved the resolution of the Pri- 
mate. Henry, in dread of Papal excommunication, re- 
solved in 1170 on the coronation of his son: and this 
office, which belonged to the see of Canterbury, he trans- 
ferred to the Archbishop of York. But the Pope’s hands 
were now freed by his successes in Italy, and the threat 
of an interdict forced the King to a show of submission. 
The Archbishop was allowed to return after a reconcilia- 
tion with the King at Freteval, and the Kentishmen 
flocked around him with uproarious welcome as he en- 
tered Canterbury. “This is England” said his clerks, 
as they saw the white headlands of the coast. ‘“ You 
will wish yourself elsewhere before fifty days are gone,” 
said Thomas sadly, and his foreboding showed his ap- 
preciation of Henry’s character. He was now in the 
royal power, and orders had already been issued in the 
younger Henry’s name for his arrest when four knights 
from the King’s court, spurred to outrage by a passionate 
outburst of their master’s wrath, crossed the sea, and on 
the 29th of December forced their way into the Arch- 
bishop’s palace. After a stormy parley with him in his 
chamber they withdrew to arm. ‘Thomas was hurried by 
his clerks into the cathedrai, but as he reached the steps 
leading from the transept to the choir his pursuers burst 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 161 


in from the cloisters. ‘*‘ Where,” cried Reginald Fitzurse 
in the dusk of the dimly lighted minster, “where is the 
traitor, Thomas Beket?” The Primate turned resolutely 
back: “ Here am J, no traitor, but a priest of God,” he 
replied, and again descending the steps he placed him- 
self with his back against a pillar and fronted his foes. 
All the bravery and violence of his old knightly life 
seemed to revive in Thomas as he tossed back the thr eats 
and demands of his assailants. “ You are our prisoner,” 
shouted Fitzurse, and the four knights seized him to dr ag 
him from the church. “Do not touch me, Reginald,” 
cried the Primate, “ pander that you are, you owe me 
fealty;” and availing himself of his personal strength he 
shook him roughly ‘off. « Strike, strike,” retorted Fitz- 
urse, and blow after blow struck Thomas to the ground. 
A retainer of Ranulf de Broc with the point of his sword 
scattered the Primate’s brains on the ground. ‘ Let us 
be off,” he cried triumphantly, “this traitor will never 
rise again.” 

The brutal murder was received with a thrill of 
horror throughout Christendom; miracles were wrought 
at the martyr’ s tomb; he was canonized and ‘became the 
most popular of English saints. The stately “ martyr- 
dom” which rose over his relics at Canterbury seemed 
to embody the triumph which his blood had won. But 
the contest had in fact revealed a new current of 
educated opinion which was to be more fatal to the 
Church than the reforms of the King. Throughout it 
Henry had been aided by a silent revolution which now 
began to part the purely literary class from the purely 
clerical. During the earlier ages of our history we have 
seen literature springing up in ecclesiastical schools, and 
protecting itself against the ignorance and violence of 
the time under ecclesiastical privileges. Almost all our 
writers from Beda to the days of the Angevins are 
clergy or monks. The revival of letters which followed 
the Conquest was a purely ecclesiastical revival ; the 
intellectual impulse which Bec had given to Normandy 
travelled across the Channel with the new Norman 
abbots who were established in the greater English mon- 


- = 
-* 


162 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


asteries; and writing-rooms or scriptoria, where the chief 
works of Latin literature, patristic or classical, were 
copied and illuminated, the lives of saints compiled, and 
entries noted in the monastic chronicle, formed from this 
time a part of every religious house of any importance. 
But the literature which found this religious shelter was 
not so much ecclesiastical as secular. Even the philo- 
sophical and devotional impulse given by Anselm pro- 
duced no English work of theology or metaphysics. 
The literary revival which followed the Conquest took 
mainly the historical form. At Durham Turgot and 
Simeon threw into Latin shape the national annals to 
the time of Henry the First with an especial regard to 
northern affairs, while the earlier events of Stephen’s 
reign were noted down by two Priors of Hexham in the 
wild border-land between England and the Scots. 

These however were the colorless jottings of mere 
annalists; it was in the Scriptorium of Canterbury, in 
Osbern’s lives of the English saints or in Eadmer’s record 
of the struggle of Anselm against the Red King and his 
successor that we see the first indications of a dis- 
tinctively English feeling telling on the new liter- 
ature. The national impulse is yet more conspicuous in 
the two historians that followed. The war-songs of the 
English conquerors of Britain were preserved by Henry, 
an Archdeacon of Huntingdon, who wove them into an- 
nals compiled from Beda and the Chronicle; while 
William, the librarian of Malmesbury, as industriously 
collected the lighter ballads which embodied the popular 
traditions of the English Kings. It is in William above 
all others that we see the new tendency of English 
literature. In himself, as in his work, he marks the 
fusion of the conquerors and the conquered, for he was 
of both English and Norman parentage and his sympathies 
were as divided as his blood. The form and style of his 
writings show the influence of those classical studies 
which were now reviving throughout Christendom. 
Monk as he is, William discards the older ecclesiastical 
models and the annalistic form. Events are grouped 
together with no strict reference to time, while the lively 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 168 


narrative flows rapidly and loosely along with constant 
breaks of digression over the general history of Europe 
and the Church. It is in this change of historic spirit 
that William takes his place as first of the more states- 
manlike and philosophic school of historians who began 
to arise in direct connexion with the Court, and among 
whom the author of the chronicle which commonly bears 
the name of “ Benedict of Peterborough” with his con- 
tinuator Roger of Howden are the most conspicuous. 
Both held judicial offices under Henry the Second, and 
it is to their position at Court that they owe the fulness 
and accuracy of their information as to affairs at home 
and abroad, as well as their copious supply of official 
documents. What is noteworthy in these writers is the 
purely political temper with which they regard the con- 
flict of Church and State in their time. But the English 
court had now become the centre of a distinctly secular 
literature. The treatise of Ranulf de Glanvill, a justiciar 
of Henry the Second, is the earliest work on English 
law, as that of the royal treasurer, Richard Fitz-Neal, on 
the Exchequer is the earliest on English government. 
Still more distinctly secular than these, though the 
work of a priest who claimed to be a bishop, are the 
writings of Gerald de Barri. Gerald is the father of our 
popular literature as he is the originator of the political 
and ecclesiastical pamphlet. Welsh blood (as his usual 
name of Giraldus Cambrensis implies) mixed with Nor- 
man in his veins, and something of the restless Celtic fire 
runs alike through his writings and his life. A busy 
scholar at Paris, a reforming Archdeacon in Wales, the 
wittiest of Court chaplains, the most troublesome of 
bishops, Gerald became the gayest and most amusing of 
all the authors of his time. In his hands the stately 
Latin tongue took the vivacity and picturesqueness of 
the jongleur’s verse. Reared as he had been in classic 
studies, he threw pedantry contemptuously aside. “ It 
is better to be dumb than not to be understood,” is his 
characteristic apology for the novelty of his style: “ new 
times require new fashions, and so I have thrown utterly 
aside the old and dry method of some authors and aimed 


164 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


at adopting the fashion of speech which is actually in 
vogue to-day.” His tract on the conquest of Ireland 
and his account of Wales, which are in fact reports of 
two journeys undertaken in those countries with John 
and Archbishop Baldwin, illustrate his rapid faculty of 
careless observation, his audacity, and his good sense. 
They are just the sort of lively, dashing letters that we 
find in the correspondence of a modern journal. ‘There 
is the same modern tone in his political pamphlets ; his 
profusion of jests, his fund of anecdote, the aptness of 
his quotations, his natural shrewdness and _ critical 
acumen, the clearness and vivacity of his style, are 
backed by a fearlessness and impetuosity that made him 
a dangerous assailant even to such a ruler as Henry the 
Second. The invectives in which Gerald poured out 
his resentment against the Angevins are the cause of 
half the scandal about Henry and his sons which has 
found its way into history. His life was wasted in an 
ineffectual attempt to secure the see of St: David’s, but . 
his pungent pen played its part in rousing the nation to 
its later struggle with the Crown. 

A tone of distinct hostility to the Church developed 
itself almost from the first among the singers of romance. 
Romance had long before taken root in the court of Henry 
the First, where under the patronage of Queen Maud the 
dreams of Arthur, so long cherished by the Celts of Brit- 
anny, and which had travelled to Wales in the train of the 
exile Rhys ap Tewdor, took shape in the History of the 
Britons by Geoffry of Monmouth. Myth, legend, tradition, 
the classical pedantry of the day, Welsh hopes of future 
triumph over the Saxon, the memories of the Crusades 
and of the world-wide dominion of Charles the Great, 
were mingled together by this daring fabulist in a work 
whose popularity became at once immense. Alfred of 
Beverly transferred Geoffry’s inventions into the region _ 
of sober history, while two Norman trouveurs, Gaimar and 
Wace, translated them into French verse. So complete 
was the credence they obtained that Arthur’s tomb 
at Glastonbury was visited by Henry the Second while 
the child of his son Geoffry and of Constance of 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 165 


Britanny received the name of the Celtic hero. Out 
of Geoffry’s creation grew little by little the poem of the 
Table Round. Britanny, which had mingled with the story 
of Arthur the older and more mysterious legend of the 
Enchanter Merlin, lent that of Lancelot to the wandering 
minstrels of the day, who moulded it as they wandered 
from hall to hall into the familiar tale of knighthood 
wrested from its loyalty by the love of woman. The 
stories of Tristram and Gawayne, at first as independent 
as that of Lancelot, were drawn with it into the whirlpool 
of Arthurian romance; and when the Church, jealous of 
the popularity of the legends of chivalry, invented as a 
counteracting influence the poem of the Sacred Dish, the 
San Graal which held the blood of the Cross invisible to 
all eyes but those of the pure in heart, the genius of a 
Court poet, Walter de Map, wove the rival legends to- 
gether, sent Arthur and his knights wandering over sea 
and land in quest of the San Graal, and crowned the work 
by the figure of Sir Galahad, the type of ideal knighthood, 
without fear and without reproach. 

Walter stands before us as the representative of a 
sudden outburst of literary, social, and religious criticism 
which followed this growth of romance and the appear- 
ance of a freer historical tone in the court of the two 
Henries. Born on the Welsh border, a student at Paris, 
a favorite with the King, a royal chaplain, justiciary, and 
ambassador, his genius was as various as it was prolific. 
He is as much at his ease in sweeping together the chit- 
chat of the time in his “ Courtly Trifles” asin creating 
the character of Sir Galahad. But he only rose to his 
fullest strength when he turned from the fields of romance 
to that of Church reform and embodied the ecclesiastical 
abuses of his day in the figure of his “ Bishop Goliath.” 
The whole spirit of Henry and his Court in their struggle 
with Thomas is reflected and illustrated in the apocalypse 
and confession of this imaginary prelate. Picture after 
picture strips the veil from the corruption of the medi- 
eval Church, its indolence, its thirst for gain, its secret 
immorality. The whole body of the clergy from Pope to 
hedge-priest is painted as busy in the chase for gain; 


166 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


what escapes the bishop is snapped up by the archdeacon, 
what escapes the archdeacon is nosed and hunted down 
by the dean, while a host of minor officials prowl hun- 
grily around these greater marauders. Out of the crowd 
of figures which fills the canvas of the satirist, pluralist 
vicars, abbots “ purple as their wines,” monks feeding and 
chattering together like parrots in the refectory, rises the 
Philistine Bishop, light of purpose, void of conscience, 
lost in sensuality, drunken, unchaste, the Goliath who 
sums up the enormities of all, and against whose forehead 
this new David slings his sharp pebble of the brook. 

It would bein the highest degree unjust to treat such 
invectives as sober history, or to judge the Church of the 
twelfth century by the taunts of Walter de Map. What 
writings such as his bring home to us is the upgrowth of 
anew literary class, not only standing apart from the 
Church but regarding it with a hardly disguised ill-will, 
and breaking down the unquestioning reverence with 
which men had till now regarded it by their sarcasm and 
abuse. The tone of intellectual contempt which begins 
with Walter de Map goes deepening on till it culminates 
in Chaucer and passes into the open revolt of the Lollard. 
But even in these early days we can hardly doubt that it 
gave Henry strength in his contest with the Church. So 
little indeed did he suffer from the murder of Archbishop 
Thomas that the years which follow it form the grandest 
_ portion of his reign. While Rome was threatening excom- 
munication he added a new realm to his dominions. 
Ireland had long since fallen from: the civilization and 
learning which its missionaries brought in the seventh 
century to the shores of Northumbria. Every element of 
improvement or progress which had been introduced into 
the island disappeared in the long and desperate struggle 
with the Danes. The coast-towns which the invaders 
founded, such as Dublin or Waterford, remained Danish 
in blood and manners and at feud with the Celtic tribes 
around them, though sometimes forced by the fortunes 
of war to pay tribute and to accept the over-lordship of 
the Irish Kings. It was through these towns however 
that the intercourse with England which had ceased since 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 167 


the eighth century was to some extent renewed in the 
eleventh. Cut off from the Church of the island by na- 
tional antipathy, the Danish coast-cities applied to the See 
of Canterbury for the ordination of their bishops, and 
acknowledged a right of spiritual supervision in Lanfrane 
and Anselm. The relations thus formed were drawn 
closer by a slave-trade between the two countries which 
the Conqueror and Bishop Wulfstan succeeded for a time 
in suppressing at Bristol but which appears to have 
quickly revived. At the time of Henry the Second’s ac- 
cession Ireland was full of Englishmen who had been 
kidnapped and sold into slavery in spite of royal pro- 
hibitions and the spiritual menaces of the English Church. 
The slave-trade afforded a legitimate pretext for war, had 
a pretext been needed by the ambition of Henry the 
Second; and within a few months of that king’s corona- 
tion John of Salisbury was despatched to obtain the 
Papal sanction for an invasion of the island. The enter- 
prise, as it was laid before Pope Hadrian IV., took the 
color of a crusade. The isolation of Ireland from the 
general body of Christendom, the absence of learning 
and civilization, the scandalous vices of its people, were 
alleged as the grounds of Henry’s action. It was the 
general belief of the time that all islands fell under the 
jurisdiction of the Papal See, and it was as a possession of 
the Roman Church that Henry sought Hadrian’s permis- 
sion to enter Ireland. His aim was to enlarge the bounds 
of the Church, to restrain the progress of vices, to cor- 
rect the manners of its people and to plant virtue among 
them, and to increase the Christian religion.” He 
engaged to “subject the people to laws, extirpate vicious 
customs, to respect the rights of the native Churches, and 
to enforce the payment of Peter’s pence ” as a recognition 
of the over-lordship of the Roman See. Hadrian by his 
bull approved the enterprise as one prompted by “ the 
ardor of faith and love of religion,’ and declared his 
will that the people of Ireland should receive Henry 
with all honor, and revere him as their lord. 

The Papal bull was produced in a great council of the 
English baronage, but the opposition was strong enough 


168 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


to force on Henry a temporary abandonment of his de- 
signs, and fourteen years passed before the scheme was 
brought to life again by the flight of Dermod, King of 
Leinster, to Henry’s court. Dermod had been driven 
from his dominions in one of the endless civil wars which 
devastated the island; he now did homage for his king- 
dom to Henry, and returned to Ireland with promises of 
aid from the English knighthood. He was followed in 
1169 by Robert FitzStephen, a son of the Constable of 
Cardigan, with a lttle band of a hundred and forty 
knights, sixty men-at-arms, and three or four hundred 
Welsh archers. Smallvas)was the number of the adven- 
turers; their horses and arms proved irresistible by the 
Irish kernes; a sally of the men of Wexford was avenged 
by the storm of their town; the Ossory clans were de- 
feated with a terrible slaughter, and Dermod, seizing a 
head from the heap of trophies which his men piled at 
his feet, tore off in savage triumph its nose and lips with 
his teeth. The arrival of fresh forces heralded the coming 
of Richard of Clare, Earl of Pembroke and Striguil, a 
ruined baron who bore the nickname of Strongbow, and 
who in defiance of Henry’s prohibition landed near Water- 
ford with a force of fifteen hundred men as Dermod’s 
mercenary.. The city was at once stormed, and the 
united forces of the Earl and King marched to the siege 
of Dublin. In spite of a relief attempted by the King of 
Connaught, who was recognized as overking of the isl- 
and by the rest of the tribes, Dublin was taken by sur- 
prise; and the marriage of Richard with Eva, Dermod’s 
‘daughter, left the Earl on the death of his father-in-law 
which followed quickly on these successes master of his 
kingdom of Leinster. The new lord had soon however 
to hurry back to England and appease the jealousy of 
Henry by the surrender of Dublin to the Crown, by doing 
homage for Leinster as an English lordship, and by ac- 
companying the King in 1171 on a voyage to the new 
dominion which the adventurers had won. 

Had fate suffered Henry to carry out his purpose, the 
conquest of Ireland would now have been accomplished. 
The King of Connaught indeed and the chiefs of Ulster 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 169 


refused him homage, but the rest of the Irish tribes owned 
his suzerainty ; the bishops in synod at Cashel recognized 
him as their lord ; and he was preparing to penetrate to 
the north and west, and to secure his conquest by a 
systematic erection of castles throughout the country, 
when the need of making terms wink Rome, whose inter- 
dict threatened to avenge the murder of Archbishop 
Thomas, recalled him in the spring of 1172 to Normandy. 
Henry averted the threatened sentence by a show of 
submission. The judicial provisions in the Constitutions 


of Clarendon were in form annulled, and liberty of elec-. 


tion was restored in the case of bishoprics and abbacies. 
In reality however the victory rested with the King. 
Throughout his reign ecclesiastical appointments re- 
mained practically in his hands and the King’s Court 
asserted its power over the spiritual jurisdiction of the 
bishops. But the strife with Thomas had roused into 
active life every element of danger which surrounded 
Henry, the envious dread of his neighbors, the disaffec- 
tion of his own house, the disgust of the barons at the 
repeated blows which he levelled at. their military and 
judicial power. The King’s withdrawal of the office of 
sheriff from the great nobles of the shire to entrust it to 
_ the lawyers and courtiers who already furnished the staff 
of the royal judges quickened the resentment of the bar- 
onage into revolt. His wife Eleanor, now parted from 
Henry hy a bitter hate, spurred her eldest son, whose 
coronation had given him the title of king, to demand 
possession of the English realm. On his father’s refusal 
the boy sought refuge with Louis of France, and _ his 
flight was the signal fora vast rising.. France, Flanders, 
and Scotland joined in league against Henry ; his younger 
sons, Richard and Geoffry, took up arms in Aquitaine, 
while the Earl of Leicester sailed from Flanders with an 
army of mercenaries to stir up England to revolt. The 
Earl’s descent ended in a crushing defeat near St. Ed- 
~mundsbury at the hands of the King’s justiciars; but no 
sooner had the French king entered Normandy and _ in- 
vested Ronen than the revolt of the baronage burst into 
flames. The Scots crossed the border, Roger Mowbray 


% 


& 


170 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


rose in Yorkshire, Ferrars, Earl of Derby, in the mid- 
land shires, Hugh Bigod in the eastern counties, while a 
Flemish fleet prepared to support the insurrection by a 
descent upon the coast. The murder of Archbishop 
Thomas still hung round Henry’s neck, and his first act 
in hurrying to England to meet these perils in 1174 was 
to prostrate himself before the shrine of the new martyr 
and to submit to a public scourging in expiation of his 
sin. But the penance was hardly wrought when all dan- 
ger was dispelled by a series of triumphs. The King of 
Scotland, William the Lion, surprised by the English 
under cover of a mist, fell into the hands of the justiciary 
Ranulf de Glanvill, and at the retreat of the Scots the 
English rebels hastened to lay down their arms. With 
the army of mercenaries which he had brought over sea 
Henry was able to return to Normandy, to raise the siege 
of Rouen, and to reduce his sons to submission. 
Through the next ten years Henry’s power was at its 
height. The French King was cowed. The Scotch 
King bought his release in 1175 by owning Henry’s 
suzerainty. The Scotch barons did homage, and Eng- 
lish garrisons manned the strongest of the Scotch cas- 
tles. In England itself church and baronage were alike 
at the King’s merey. Eleanor was imprisoned: and the 
younger Henry, though always troublesome, remained 
powerless to do harm. The King availed himself of this 
rest from outer foes to push forward his judicial and ad- 
ministrative organization. At the outset of his reign he 
had restored the King’s court and the occasional circuits 
of its justices; but the revolt was hardly over when in 
in 1176 the Assize of Northampton rendered this insti- 
tution permanent and regular by dividing the kingdom 
into six districts, to each of which three itinerant judges 
were assigned. The circuits thus marked out corre- 
spond roughly with those that still exist. The primary 
object of these circuits was financial; but the rendering 
of the King’s justice went on side by side with the exac- 
tion of the King’s dues, and this carrying of justice to 
every corner of the realm was made still more effective 
by the abolition of all feudal exemptions from the royal 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 171 


jurisdiction. The chief danger of the new system lay in 
the opportunities it afforded to judicial corruption ; and 
so great were its abuses, that in 1178 Henry was forced 
to restrict for a while the number of justices to five, and 
to reserve appeals from their court to himself in council. 
The Court of Appeal which was thus created, that of the 
King in Council, gave birth as time went on to tribunal 
after tribunal. It is from it that the judicial powers now 
exercised by the Privy Council are derived, as well as 
the equitable jurisdiction of the Chancellor. In the 
next century it became the Great Council of the realm, | 
and it is from this Great Council, in its two distinct 
capacities, that the Privy Council drew its legislative, 
and the House of Lords its judicial character. The 
Court of Star Chamber and the Judicial Committee of 
the Privy Council are later offshoots of Henry’s Court of 
Appeal. From the judicial organization of the realm, he 
turned to its military organization, and in 1181 an Assize 
of Arms restored the national fyrd or militia to the place 
which it had lost at the Conquest. The substitution of 
scutage for military service had freed the crown from its 
dependence on the baronage and its feudal retainers , 
the Assize of Arms replaced this feudal organizaticn by 
the older obligation of every freeman to serve in defence 
of the realm. Every knight was now bound to appear 
in coat of mail and with shield and lance, every free- 
holder with lance and hauberk, every burgess and poorer 
freeman with lance and helmet, at the King’s call. The 
levy of an armed nation was thus placed wholly at the 
disposal of the Crown for purposes of defence. 

A fresh revolt of the younger Henry with his brother 
Geoffry in 1183 hardly broke the current of Henry’s 
success. The revolt ended with the young King’s death, 
and in 1186 this was followed by the death of Geoffry. 
Richard, now his father’s heir, remained busy in Aqui- 
taine ; and Henry was himself occupied with plans for 
the recovery of Jerusalem, which had been taken by 
Saladin in 1187. The * Saladin tithe,” a tax levied on 
all goods and chattels, and memorable as the first English 
instance of taxation on personal property, was granted 


172 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


to the King at the opening of 1188 to support his intended 
Crusade. But the Crusade was hindered by strife which 
broke out between Richard and the new French King, 
Philip; and while Henry strove in vain to .bring about 
peace, a suspicion that he purposed to make his youngest 
son, John, his heir drove Richard to Philip’s side. His 
father, broken in health and spirits, negotiated fruitlessly 
through the winter, but with the spring of 1189 Richard 
and the French King suddenly appeared before Le Mans. 
Henry was driven in headlong flight from the town. Tra- 
dition tells how from a height where he halted to look 
back on the burning city, so dear to him as his birthplace, 
the King hurled his curse against God: “Since Thou 
hast taken from me the town I loved best, where I was 
born and bred, and where my father lies buried, I will 
have my revenge on Thee too—I will rob Thee of that 
thing Thou lovest most in me.” If the words were ut- 
tered, they were the frenzied words of a dying man. 
Death drew Henry to the home of his race, but Tours 
fell as he lay at Saumur, and the hunted King was driven 
to beg mercy from his foes. They gave him the list of 
the conspirators against hin: at its head was the name 
of one, his love for whom had brought with it the ruin 
that was crushing him, his youngest son, John. ‘ Now,” 
he said, as he turned his face to the wall, “let things go 
as they will—I care no more for myself or for the world.” 
The end was come at last. Henry was borne to Chinon 
by the silvery waters of Vienne, and muttering, ** Shame, 
shame on a conquered King, passed sullenly away. 


“ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 107TI—1214. 173 


CHAPTER IY. 
THE ANGEVIN KINGS. 
1189—1204. 


TuHEfall_of Henry the Second only showed the 
strength of the system he had built up on this side the 
sea. In the hands of the Justiciar, Ranulf de Glanvill, 
England remained peaceful through the last stormy 
months of his reign, and his successor Richard found it 
undisturbed when he came for his crowning in the 
autumn of 1189. Though born at Oxford, Richard had 
been bred in Aquitaine; he was an utter stranger to his 
realm, and his visit was simply for the purpose of gather- 
ing’ money for a Crusade. Sheriffdoms, bishoprics, were 
sold; even the supremacy..over..Scotland_ was bought 
back again by William the Lion; and it was with the 
wealth which these measures won that Richardmade his 
way in-1190 to Marseilles and sailed thence to Messina. 
Here he found his army and a host under King Philip of 
France ; and the winter was spent in quarrels between 
the two Kings and a strife between Richard and Tancred 
of Sicily. In the spring of 1191 his mother Eleanor ar- 
rived with ill news from England. Richard had left the 
realm under the regency of two bishops, Hugh Puiset of 
Durham and William Longchamp of Ely; but before 
quitting France he had entrusted it wholly to the latter, 
who stood at the head of Church and State as at once 
Justiciar and Papal Legate. Longchamp was loyal to 
the King, but his exactions and scorn of Englishmen 
roused a fierce hatred among the baronage, and this hatred 


174 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


found ahead in John, While richly gifting his brother 
with earldoms and lands, Richard had ‘taken oath ffom 
him that he would _quit.England for three years.” But 
tidings that the Justiciar was striving to “secure-the suc- 


cession of Arthur, the child of his elder brother Geoffry | 


and of Constance of Britanny, to the English crown at 
once recalled John to the realm, and peace between him 
and Longchamp was only preserved by the influence of 
the queen-mother Eleanor. Richard met these news by 
sending William of Coutances, the Archbishop of Rouen, 
with full but secret powers to England. On his landing 
in the summer of 1191-William found the country already 
in arms. No battle had been fought, but John had seized 


many of the royal castles, and “the indignation stirred — 


by Longchamp’s arrest of Archbishop Geoffry- of -York,— 


a_bastard~son of Henry the Second, called the whole 
-baronage.to-the field. The nobles-swore fealty*te-John 
as Richard’s successor, and William of Coutances saw 
himself forced to show his commission as Justiciar;and 
to assent to Longchamp’s exile from. the.realm. 

The tidings of this revolution reached Richard in the 
Holy Land. He had landed at Acre in the summer and 
joined with the French King in its siege. But on the 
surrender of the town Philip at once sailed home, while 
Richard, marching from Acre to Joppa, pushed inland to 
Jerusalem. The city however was saved by false news of 
its strength, and through the following winter and the 
spring of 1192 the King limited his activity to securing 
the fortresses of southern Palestine. In June he again 
advanced on Jerusalem, but the revolt of his army forced 
him a second time to fall back, and news of Philip’s in- 
trigues with John drove him to abandon further efforts. 
There-was-need to hastenhome. Sailing forspééd’s bake 
in a merchant vessel, hewas driven by a storm on the 
Adriatic coast, and while journeying.in-disguisé™over= 
land arrested.in--December.at_Vienna by his personal 
enemy, Duke Leopold of Austria... Through the whole 
year John, in disgust at his displacement by William of 
Coutances, had been plotting fruitlessly. with Philip. But 
the news of this capture at once roused both to activity. 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 175 


John secured his castles and seized Windsor, giving out 
that the King would never return; while Philip strove 
to induce the Emperor, Henry the Sixth, to whom the 
~ Duke of Austria had given Richard-up, to retain his-cap- 
tive. Buta new influence now appeared on the scene. 
The see of Canterbury was vacant, and Richard from his 
prison bestowed it on Hubert Walter, the Bishop ot 
Salisbury, a nephew of Ranulf de Glanvill and who ha: 
acted as secretary to Bishop Longchamp. Huberts 
ability was seen in the skill with which he held John at 
bay and raised the enormous ransom which Henry de-. 
manded, the whole people, clergy as well as lay, paying 
a fourth of their movable goods. To gain his release 
however Richard was forced besides this payment of ran- 
som to do homage to the Emperor, not only for the king- 
dom of Arles with which Henry invested him but for 
England itself, whose~crown-he~resignedinto-theEm- 
peror’s hands and received back as a fief. But. John’s 
open revolt made even these terms welcome, and Richard 
hurried to Englatrd-in-the-springe-of 1194" He found the 
rising already quelled by the decision with which the 
Primate led an army against John’s castles, and his land- 
ing was followed by his brother’s complete submission. 
The firmness of Hubert Walter had secured order in 
England, but oversea Richard found himself face to face 
with dangers which he was too clear-sighted to under- 
value. Destitute of his father’s administrative genius, 
less ingenious in his political conceptions than John, 
Richard was far from being a mere soldier. A love of 
adventure, a pride in sheer physical strength, here and 
there a romantic generosity, jostled roughly with the 
craft, the unscrupulousness, the violence of his race; but 
he was at heart a statesman, cool and patient in the exe- 
cution of his plans as he was bold in their conception. 
“ The devil is loose; take care of yourself,” Philip had 
written to John at the news of Richard’s release. In the 
French King’s case a restless ambition was spurred to 
action by insults which he had borne during the Crusade. 
He had availed himself of Richard’s imprisonment to in- 
vade Normandy, while the lords of Aquitaine rose in open 


176. HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


revolt under the troubadour Bertrand de Born. Jeal- 
ousy of the rule of strangers, weariness of the turbulence 
of the mercenary soldiers of the Angevins or of the greed 
and oppression of their financial administration, com- 
bined with an impatience of their firm government and 
vigorous justice to alienate the nobles of their provinces 
on the Continent. Loyalty among the people there was 
none ; even Anjou, the home of their race, drifted towards 
Philip as steadly as Poitou. But in warlike ability 
Richard was more than Philip’s peer. He held him in 
check on the Norman frontier and surprised his treasure 
at Freteval while he reduced to submission the rebels of 
Aquitaine. Hubert Walter gathered vast sums to sup- 
port the army of mercenaries which Richard led against 
his foes. The country groaned under its burdens, but it 
owned the justice and firmness of the Primate’s rule, and 
the measures which he took to procure money with as 
little oppression as might be proved steps in the educa- 
tion of the nation in its own self-government. The taxes 
were assessed by a jury of sworn knights at each circuit 
of the justices ; the grand jury of the county was based 
on the election of knights in the hundred courts ; and 
the keeping of pleas of the crown was taken from the 
sheriff and given to a newly elected officer, the coroner. 
In these elections were found at a later time precedents 
for parliamentary representation ; in Hubert’s mind they 
were doubtless intended to do little more than reconcile 
the people to the crushing taxation. His work poured 
a million into the treasury, and enabled Richard during 
a short truce to detach Flanders by his bribes from the 
French alliance, and to unite the Counts of Chartres, 
Champagne, and Boulogne with the Bretons in a revolt 
against Philip. He won a yet more valuable aid in the 
election of his nephew Otto of Saxony, a son of Henry 
the Lion, to the German throne, and his envoy William 
Longchamp knitted an alliance which would bring the 
German lances to bear on the King of Paris. 

But the security of Normandy was requisite to the success 
of these wider plans, and Richard saw that its defence 
could no longer rest on the loyalty of the Norman people. 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 177 


His father might trace his descent through Matilda from 
the line of Rolf, but the Angevin ruler was in fact a 
stranger to the Norman. It was impossible for a Norman 
to recognize his Duke with any real sympathy in the 
Angevin prince whom he saw moving along the border 
at the head of Brabancon mercenaries, in whose camp the 
old names of the Norman baronage were missing and 
Merchadé, a Gascon ruffian, held supreme command. The 
purely military site that Richard selected for a new 
fortress with which he guarded the border showed his 
realization of the fact that Normandy could now only be 
held by force of arms. As a monument of warlike skill - 
his ** Saucy Castle,” Chateau Gaillard, stands first among 
the fortresses of the middle ages. Richard fixed its site 
where the Seine bends suddenly at Gaillon in a great 
semicircle to the north, and where the valley of Les 
Andelys breaks the line of the chalk cliffs along its 
banks. Blue masses of woodland crown the distant hills ; 
within the river curve lies a dull reach of flat meadow, 
around which the Seine, broken with green islets and 
dappled with the gray and blue of the sky, flashes like a 
silver bow on its way to Rouen. The castle formed part 
of an entrenched camp which Richard designed to cover 
his Norman capital. Approach by the river was blocked 
by a stockade and a bridge of boats, by a fort on the islet 
in mid stream, and by a tower which the King built in 
the valley of the Gambon, then an impassable marsh. In 
the angle between this valley and the Seine, on a spur of 
the chalk hills which only a narrow neck of Jand con- 
nects with the general plateau, rose at the height of three 
hundred feet above the river the crowning fortress of the 
whole. Its outworks and the walls which connected it 
with the town and stockade have for the most part gone, 
but time and the hand of man have done little to destroy 
the fortifications themselves—the fosse, hewn deep into 
the solid rock, with casemates hollowed out along its 
sides, the fluted walls of the citadel, the huge donjon 
looking down on the brown roofs and huddled gables of 
Les Andelys. Even now in itsruin we can understand 
the triumphant outburst of its royal builder as he saw ts 


178 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


rising against the sky: ‘“ How pretty a child is mine, 
this child of but one year old!” 

‘The easy reduction of Normandy on the fall of Chateau 
Gaillard at a later time proved Richard’s foresight; but 
foresight and sagacity were mingled in him with abrutal 
violence and a callous indifference to honor. “I would 
take it, were its walls of iron,” Philip exclaimedin wrath 
as he saw the fortress rise. “I would hold it, were its 
walls of butter,” was the defiant answer of his foe. It 
was Church land and the Ar chbishop of Rouen laid Nor- 
mandy under interdict at its seizure, but the King met 
the interdict with mockery, and intrigued with Rome 
till the censure was withdrawn. He was just as defiant 
of a “rain of blood,’ whose fall scared his courtiers. 
‘Had an angel from heaven bid him abandon his work,” 
says a cool observer, “ he would have answered with a 
curse.” The twelvemonth’ s hard work, in fact, by secur- 
ing the Norman frontier set Richard free to deal his long- 
planned blow at Philip. Money only was wanting ; for 
England had at last struck against the continned exac- 
tions. In 1198 Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, brought nobles 
and bishops to refuse a new demand for the maintenance 
of foreign soldiers, and Hubert Walter resigned in de- 
spair. A new justiciar, Geoffry Fitz-Peter, Earl of Essex, 
extorted some money bya harsh assize of the forests ; but 
the exchequer was soon drained, and Richard listened 
with more than the greed of his race to rumors that a 
treasure had been found in the fields of the Limousin. 
Twelve knights of gold seated round a golden table 
were the find, it was said, of the Lord of Chaluz. Treas- 
ure-trove at any rate there was, and in the spring of 1199 
Richard prowled around the walls. But the castle held. 
stubbornly out till the King’s greed passed into savage 
menace. He would hang all, he swore—man, woman, 
the very child at the breast. In the midst of his threats 
an arrow from the wall struck him down. He died as he 
past had ‘kept him from confession lest he ~should “Ge 
forced to pardon Philip, forgiving with kingly Benerostiy 
the archer who had shot him. 


ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071—1214. 179 


The Angevin dominion broke to pieces at his death. 
John was acknowledged.as-King in England and. Nor- 
mandy, Aquitaine was.secured.for him. by its Duchess, 
his mother Eleanor ;..but.Anjou, Maine, and Touraine did 
homage to Arthur, the son of his elder brother Geoffry, 
_the late Duke of Britanny. The ambition of Philip, who 
protected his cause, turned the day against Arthur; the 
Angevins rose against the French garrisons with which 
the French King practically annexed the country, and in 
May 1200-a-treaty-between..the two kings left John 
master of the whole dominion of his house. But fresh 
troubles broke out in Poitou; Philip, on John’s refusal 
to answer the charges of the Poitevin barons at his Court, 
declared_in-1202-his frefs-forfeited; and Arthur, now a 
boy of fifteen, strove-to seize-Eleanor_in the castle of 
Mirabeau. Surprised at its siege -bya_rapid march of 
the King, the boy was taken prisoner to. Rouen, and 
murdered. there in- the- spring of 1203, .as.men.believed, 
by his uncle’s hand. This brutal outrage at once roused 
the French provinces in revolt, while-Philip-sentenced. 
John to forfeiture as a murderer and marched straight on 
Normandy. The ease with which the conqtést of the 
Duchy was effected can only be explained by the utter 
absence of any popular resistance on the part of the 
Normans themselves. Half a century before the sight of 
a Frenchman in the land would have roused every peasant 
to arms from Avranches to Dieppe. But town after town 
surrendered at the mere summons of Philip, and the con- 
quest was hardly over before Normandy settled down 
into the most loyal-of-the provinces.of-France.--Much 
of this was due to the wise liberality with which Philip 
met the claims of the towns to independence and self- 
government, as well as to the overpowering force and 
military ability with which the conquest was effected. 
But the utter absence of opposition sprang from a deeper 
cause. To the Norman his transfer from John to Philip 
was a mere passing from one-foreign—master to another, 
and foreigner for foreigner Philip was the less alien of 
the two. Between France and Normandy there had 
been as many years of friendship as of strife; between 


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180 - HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Norman and Angevin lay a century of bitterest hate. 
Moreover, the subjection to France was the: realization 
in fact of a dependence which had always existed in 
theory; Philip entered Rouen as the over-lord of its 
Dukes; while the submission to the house of Anjou had 
been the most humiliating of.all submissions, the submis- 
sion to an equal. In 1204 Philip turned on the south 
with as startling a success. Maine, Anjou, and Touraine 
passed with little resistance into his hands, and the death 
of Eleanor was followed by the submission of the bulk of 
Aquitaine. Little was left save the country south of the 
Garonne; and from the lordship of a vast empire that 
stretched from the Tyne to the Pyrenees John.saw_him- 
self reduced at.a_blow.to.the realm of England. 


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AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK III. 
1204—1291. | 


A chronicle drawn up at the monastery of Barnwell near Cam- 
bridge, and which has been embodied in the “‘ Memoriale’’ of Walter 
of Coventry, gives us a contemporary account of the period from 1201 
to 1225. We possess another contemporary annalist for the same 
period in Roger of Wendover, the first of the published chroniclers of 
St. Albans, whose work extends to 1235. Though full of detail Roger 
is inaccurate, and he has strong royal and ecclesiastical sympathies ; 
but his chronicle was subsequently revised in a more patriotic sense by 
another monk of the same abbey, Matthew Paris, and continued in the 
*¢ Greater Chronicle ”’ of the latter. 

Matthew has‘left a parallel but shorter account of the time in his 
‘* Historia Anglorum”’ (from the Conquest to 1253). He is the last of 
the great chroniclers of his house ; for the chronicles of Rishanger, his 
successor at St. Albans, and of the obscurer annalists who worked on 
at that Abbey till the Wars of the Roses are little save scant and life- 
less jottings of events which become more and more local as time goes 
on. The annals of the abbeys of Waverley, Dunstable, and Burton, 
which have been published in the ‘‘ Annales Monastici’’ of the Rolls 
series, add important details for the reigns of John and Henry III. 
Those of Melrose, Osney, and Lanercost help usin the close of the 
latter reign, where help is especially weleome. For the Barons’ war 
we have besides these the royalist chronicle of Wykes, Rishanger’s 
fragment published by the Camden Society, and a chronicle of Bar- 
tholomew de Cotton, which is contemporary from 1264 to 1298. Where 
the chronicles fail however the public documents of the realm become 
of high importance. The ‘‘ Royal Letters ’’ (1216—1272) which have 
been printed from the Patent Rolls by Professor Shirley (Rolls Series) 
throw great light on Henry’s politics. 

Our municipal history during this period is fully represented by that 
of London. For the general history of the capital the Rolls series has 
given us its ‘‘ Liber Albus”’ and ‘‘ Liber Custumarum,’’ while a vivid 
account of its communal revolution is to be found in the ‘‘ Liber de 
Antiquis Legibus’’ published by the Camden Society. A store of 
documents will be found in the Charter Rolls published by the Record 
Commission, in Brady’s work on ‘‘ English Boroughs,’’ and in the 
** Ordinances of English Gilds,’’ published with a remarkable preface 
from the pen of Dr. Brentano by the Early English Text Society. 
For our religious and intellectual history materials now become abun- 


dant. Grosseteste’s Letters throw light on the state of the Church and 
(183) 


184 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 


its relations with Rome; those of Adam Marsh give us interesting de- 
tails of Earl Simon’s relation to the religious movement of his day ;- 
and Eccleston’s tract on the arrival of the Friars is embodied in the 
‘*Monumenta Franciscana.’’ For the Universities we have the col- 
lection of materials edited by Mr. Anstey under the name of ‘* Muni- 
menta Academica.”’ 

With the close of Henry’s reign our directly historic materials be- 
come scantier and scantier. ‘The monastic annals we have before men- 
tioned are supplemented by the jejune entries of Trivet and Murimuth, 
by the ‘‘ Annales Angliz et Scotie,’’ by Rishanger’s Chronicle, his 
‘* Gesta Edwardi Primi,’? and three fragments of his annals (all pub- 
lished in the Rolls Series). The portion of the so-called ‘‘ Walsing- 
ham’s History’”’ which relates to this period is now attributed by Mr. 
Riley to Rishanger’s hand. . For the wars in the north and in the west 
we have no records from the side of the conquered. The social and 
physical state of Wales indeed is illustrated by the ‘‘Itinerarium ”’ 
which Gerald du Barri drew up in the twelfth century, but Scotland 
has nv contemporary chronicles for this period ; the jingling rimes of 
Blind Harry are two hundred years later than his hero, Wallace. We 
possess however a copious collection of State papers in the ‘‘ Rotuli 
Scotize,’’ the ‘‘Documents and Records illustrative of the History of 
Scotland ’’ which were edited by Sir F. Palgrave, as well as in Rymer’s 
Feedera. For the history of our Parliament the most noteworthy ma- 
terials have been collected by Professor Stubbs in his Select Charters, 
and he has added to them a short treatise called ‘‘ Modus Tenendi 
Parliamenta,’’ which may be taken as a fair account of its actual state 
and powers in the fourteenth century. 


CHAPTER I. 
JOHN, 
1214—1216. 


_. THe loss of Normandy did more than drive John from 
the foreign dominions of his race ; it set him face to face 
with England itself. England was no longer a distant 
treasure-house from which gold could be drawn for wars 
along the Epte or the Loire, no longer a possession to be 
kept in order by wise ministers and by flying visits from’ 
its foreign King. Henceforth it was his home. It was 
to be ruled by his personal and continuous rule. People 
and sovereign were to know each other, to be brought 
into contact with each other as they had never been 
brought since the conquest of the Norman. The change 
in the attitude of the king was the more momentous that 
it took place at a time when the attitude of the country 
itself was rapidly changing. The Norman Conquest 
had given a new aspect to the land. A foreign king 
ruled it through foreign ministers. Foreign nobles were 
quartered in every manor. . A military organization of 
the country changed while it simplified the holding of 
every estate. Huge castles of white stone bridled town 
and country ; huge stone minsters told how the Norman 
had bridled even the Church. But the change was in 
great measure an external one. The real life of the 
nation was little affected by the shock of the Conquest. 
English institutions, the local, judicial, and adminis- 
trative forms of the country were the same as of old. 
Like the English tongue they remained practically 
unaltered. For a century after the Conyuest only a 


few new words crept in from the language of the con- 
(185) 


186 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


querors, and so entirely did the spoken tongue of the 
nation at large remain unchanged that William himself 
tried to learn it that he might administer justice to his 
subjects. Even English literature, banished as it was 
from the court of the stranger and exposed to the fash- 
ionable rivalry of Latin scholars, survived not only in 
religious works, in poetic paraphrases of gospels and 
psalms, but in the great monument of our prose, the 
English Chronicle. It was not till the miserable reign 
of Stephen that the Chronicle died out in the Abbey of 
Peterborough. But the “Sayings of Alfred” show a 
native literature going on through the reign of Henry the 
Second, and the appearance of a great work of English 
verse coincides in point of time with the return of John 
to his island realm. ‘ There was a priest in the land 
whose name was Layamon ; he was the son of Leovenath ; 
may the Lord be gracious to him! He dwelt at Earnley, 
a noble church on the bank of Severn (good it seemed 
to him!) near Radstone, where he read books. It came 
to mind to him and in his chiefest thought that he would 
tell the noble deeds of England, what the men were 
named and whence they came who first had English 
land.” Journeying far and wide over the country, the 
priest of Earnley found Beda and Wace, the books too 
of St. Albin and St. Austin. “ Layamon laid down 
these books and turned the leaves; he beheld them 
lovingly; may the Lord be gracious to him! Pen he 
took with finger and wrote a book-skin, and the true 
words set together, and compressed the three books into 
one.” Layamon’s church is now that of Areley, near 
Bewdley in Worcestershire; his poem was in fact an 
expansion of Wace’s ** Brut” with insertions from Beda. 
Historically it is worthless ; but as a monument of our 
language it is beyond all price. In more than thirty 
thousand lines not more than fifty Norman words are to 
be found. Even the old poetic tradition remains the 
same. The alliterative metre of the earlier verse is still 
only slightly affected by rhyming terminations; the similes 
are the few natural ‘similes of Cedmon ; the battle-scenes 
are painted with the same rough, simple jov. Siig 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291., 187 


Instead of crushing England indeed the Conquest did 
more than any event that had gone before to build up an 
English people. All local distinctions, the distinction 
of Saxon trom Mercian, of both from Northumbrian, died 
away beneath the common pressure of the stranger. 
Lhe Conquest was hardly over when we see the rise of 
a new national feeling, of a new patriotism. In his quiet 
cell at Worcester the monk Florence strives to palliate 
by excuses of treason or the weakness of rulers the de- 
feats of Englishmen by the Danes. lfred, the great 
name of the English past, gathers round him a legend-. 
ary worship, and the “Sayings of Ailfred”” embody the 
ideal of an English king. We see the new vigor drawn 
from this deeper consciousness of national unity in a 
national action which began as soon as the Conquest had 
given place to strife among the conquerors. A common 
hostility to the conquering baronage gave the nation 
leaders in its foreign sovereigns, and the sword which 
had been sheathed at Senlac was drawn for triumphs 
which avenged it. It was under William the Red that 
English soldiers shouted scorn at the Norman barons 
who surrendered at Rochester. It was under Henry the 
First that an English army faced Duke Robert and his 
foreign knighthood when they landed for a fresh inva- 
Sion, “not fearing the Normans.” It was under the 
same great Kine that Englishmen conquered Normandy 
in turn on the field of Tenchebray. This overthrow of 
the conquering baronage, this union of the conquered 
with the King, brought about the fusion of the conquer- 
ors in the general body of the English people. As early 
as the days of Henry the Second the descendants of Nor- 
man and Englishman had become indistinguishable. Both 
found a bond in'a common English feeling and English 
patriotism, in a common hatred of the Angevin and 
Poitevin “foreigners” who streamed into England in 
the wake of Henry and his sons. Both had profited by 
the stern discipline of the Norman rule. The wretched 
reign of Stephen alone broke the long peace, a peace 
without parallel elsewhere, which in England stretched 
from the settlement of the Conquest to the return of 


188 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


John. Of her kings’ forays along Norman or Aquita- 
nian borders England heard little; she cared less. Even 
Richard’s crusade woke little interest in his island realm. 
What England saw in her Kings was “the good peace 
they made in the land.” And with peace came a stern 
but equitable rule, judicial and administrative reforms 
that carried order and justice to every corner of the land, 
a wealth that grew steadily in spite of heavy taxation, 
an immense outburst of material and intellectual ac- 
tivity. 

It was with a new English people therefore that John 
fotnd himself face to face. The nation which he fronted 
was a nation quickened with a new life and throbbing 
with a new energy. Not least among the signs of this 
energy was the upgrowth of our Universities. The 
establishment of the great schools which bore this name 
was everywhere throughout Europe a special mark of 
the impulse which Christendom gained from the eru- 
sades. A new fervor of study sprang up in the West 
from its contact with the more cultured East. Travel- 
lers like Adelard of Bath brought back the first rudi- 
ments of physical and mathematical science from the 
schools of Cordova or Bagdad. In the twelfth century 
a classical revival restored Caesar and Virgil to the list 
of monastic studies, and left its stamp on the pedantic 
style, the profuse classical quotations of writers like 
William of Malmesbury or John of Salisbury. The 
scholastic philosophy sprang up in the schools of Paris. 
The Roman law was revived by the imperialist doctors 
of Bologna. The long mental inactivity of feudal Europe 
broke up like ice before a summer’s sun. Wandering 
teachers such as Lanfranc or Anselm crossed sea and 
land to spread the new power of knowledge. The same 
spirit of restlessness, of inquiry, of impatience with the 
older traditions of mankind either local or intellectual 
that drove half Christendom to the tomb of its Lord 
crowded the roads with thousands of young scholars 
hurrying to the chosen seats where teachers were gath- 
ered together. A new power sprang up in the midst of 
a world which had till now recognized no power but that 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 189 


of sheer brute force. Poor as they were, sometimes even 
of servile race, the wandering scholars who lectured in 
every cloister were hailed as “masters” by the crowds 
at their feet. Abelard was a foe worthy of the threats 
of councils, of the thunders of the Church. The teach- 
ing of a single Lombard was of note enough in England 
to draw down the prohibition of a King. 
Vacarius was probably a guest in the court of Arch- 
~ bishop Theobald where Thomas of London and John of 
Salisbury were already busy with the study of the Civil 
Law. But when he opened lectures on it at Oxford he was 
at once silenced by Stephen, who was at that moment at 
-war with the Church and jealous of the power which the 
wreck of the royal authority was throwing into Theo- 
bald’s hands. At this time Oxford stood in the first rank 
among English towns. Its town church of St. Martin 
rose from the midst of a huddled group of houses, girded 
in with massive walls, that lay aiong the dry upper ground 
of a low peninsula between the streams of Cherwell and 
the Thames. The ground fell gently on either side, east- 
ward and westward, to these rivers; while on the south 
a sharper descent led down across swampy meadows, to 
the ford from which the town drew its name and to the 
bridge that succeeded it. Around lay a wild forest country, 
moors such as Cowley and Bullingdon fringing the course 
of Thames, great woods of which Shotover and Bagley 
are the relics closing the horizon to the south and east. 
Though the two huge towers of its Norman castle marked 
the strategic importance of Oxford as commanding the 
river valley along which the commerce of Southern Eng- 
land mainly flowed, its walls formed the least element in 
the town’s military strength, for on every side but the 
north it was guarded by the swampy meadows along 
Cherwell or by an intricate network of streams into 
which the Thames breaks among the meadows of Osney. 
From the midst of these meadows rose a mitred abbey of 
_Austin Canons which with the elder priory of St. Frides- 
wide gave Oxford some ecclesiastical dignity. The res- 
idence of the Norman house of the D’Oillis within its 
castle, the frequent visits of English kings to a palace 


199 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


without its walls, the presence again and again o1 im- 
portant Parliaments, marked its political weight with the 
realm. The settlement of one of the wealthiest among 
the English Jewries in the very heart of the town indi- 
cated, while it promoted, the activity of its trade. No 
place better illustrates the transformation of the land in 
the hands of its Norman masters, the sudden outburst of 
industrial effort, the sudden expansion of commerce and 
accumulation of wealth which followed the Conquest. 
To the west of the town rose one of the stateliest of 
English castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly 
less stately abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north 
the last of the Norman kings raised his palace of Beau- 
mont. In the southern quarter of the city the canons of 
St. Frideswide reared the church which still exists as the 
diocesan cathedral, while the piety of the Norman Castel- 
lans rebuilt almost all its parish churches and founded 
within their new castle walls the church of the Canons 
of St. George. 

We know nothing of the cause which drew students 
and teachers within the walls of Oxford. It is possible 
that here as elsewhere a new teacher quickened older 
educational foundations, and that the cloisters of Osney 
and St. Frideswide already possessed schools which burst 
into a larger life under the impulse of Vacarius. As yet 
however the fortunes of the University were obscured 
by the glories of Paris. English scholars gathered in 
thousands round the chairs of William of Champeaux or 
Abelard. The English took their place as one of the 
“nations” of the French University. John of Salisbury 
became famous as one of the Parisian teachers. ‘Thomas 
of London wandered to Paris from his school at Merton. 
But through the peaceful reign of Henry the Second 
Oxford quietly grew in numbers and repute, and forty 
years after the visit of Vacarius its educational position 
was fully established. When Gerald of Wales read his 
amnsing Topography of Ireland to its students the most 
learned and famous of the English clergy were to be 
found within its walls. At the opening of the thirteenth 
century Oxford stood without a rival in its own country 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 191 


while in European celebrity it took rank with the greatess 
schools of the Western world. But to realize this Oxford 
of the past we must dismiss from our minds all recol- 
lections of the Oxford of the present. In the outer look 
of the new University there was nothing of the pomp 
that overawes the freshman as he first paces the “ High” 
or looks down from the gallery of St. Mary’s. In 
the stead of long fronts of memorable colleges, of 
stately walks beneath immemorial elms, history plunges 
us into the mean and filthy lanes of a medieval town. 
Thousands of boys, huddled in bare lodging-houses, 
clustering round teachers as poor as themselves in 
church porch*and house porch, drinking, quarrelling, 
dicing, begging at the corners of the streets, take 
the place of the brightly-colored train of doctors and 
Heads. Mayor and Chancellor struggled in vain to 
enforce order or peace on this seething mass of turbulent 
life. The retainers who followed their young lords to 
the University fought out the feuds of their houses in 
the streets. Scholars from Kent and scholars from Scot- 
land waged the bitter struggle of North and South. At 
nightfall roysterer and reveller roamed with torches 
through the narrow lanes, defying bailiffs, and cutting 
down burghers at their doors. Now a mob of clerks 
plunged into the Jewry and wiped off the memory of 
bills and bonds by sacking a Hebrew house or two. Now 
a tavern squabble between scholar and townsman widened 
into a general broil, and the academical bell of St. Mary’s 
vied with the town bell of St. Martin’s in clanging to 
arms. Every phase of ecclesiastical controversy or polit- 
ical strife was preluded by some fierce outbreak in this 
turbulent, surging mob. When England growled at 
the exactions of the Papacy in the years that were to 
follow the students besieged a legate in the abbot’s 
house at Osney. A murderous town and gown row pre- 
ceded the opening of the Barons’ War. “When Oxford 
draws knife,’ ran an old rime, “ England's soon at 
strife.” ‘ 

But the turbulence and stir was a stir and turbulence 
of life, A keen thirst for knowledge, a passionate poetry 


192 TORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


of devotion, gathered thousands round the poorest scholar 
and welcomed the barefoot friar. Edmund Rich—Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury and saint in later days—came 
about the time we have reached to Oxford, a boy of 
twelve years old, from a little lane at Abingdon that 
still bears his name. He found his school in an inn that 
belonged to the abbey of Eynsham where his father had 
taken refuge from the world. His mother was a pious 
woman of the day, too poor to give her boy much outfit 
besides the hair shirt that he promised to wear every 
Wednesday ; but Edmund was no poorer than his neigh- 
bors. He plunged at once into the nobler life of the 
place, its ardor for, knowledge, its mystical piety. 
Secretly,” perhaps at eventide when the shadows were 
gathering in the church of St. Mary and the crowd of 
teachers and students had left its aisles, the boy stood 
before an image of the Virgin, and placing a ring of gold 
upon its finger took Mary for his bride. Years of study, 
broken by a fever that raged among the crowded, noisome 
streets, brought the time for completing his education at 
Paris ; and Edmund, hand in hand with a brother Robert 
of his, begged his way as poor scholars were wont to the 
great school of Western Christendom. Here a damsel, 
heedless of his tonsure, wooed him so pertinaciously that 
Edmund consented at last to an assignation ; but when 
he appeared it was in company of grave academical of- 
ficials who, as the maiden declared in the hour of peni- 
tence which followed, “straightway whipped the offend- 
ing Eve out of her.” Still true to his Virgin bridal, 
Edmund on his return from Paris became the most 
popular of Oxford teachers. It is to him that Oxford 
owes her first introduction to the Logic of Aristotle. We 
see him in the little room which he hired, with the Virgin’s 
chapel hard by, his gray gown reaching to his feet, ascetic 
in his devotion, falling asleep in lecture time after a 
sleepless night of prayer, but gifted with a grace and 
cheerfulness of manner which told of his French training 
and a chivalrous love of knowledge that let his pupils 
pay what they would. ‘ Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” 
the young tutor would say, a touch of scholarly pride 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 193 


perhaps mingling with his contempt of worldly things, 
as he threw down the fee on the dusty window-ledge 
whence a thievish student would sometimes run off with 
it. But even knowledge brought its troubles; the Old 
Testament, which with a copy of the Decretals long 
formed his sole library, frowned down upon a love of 
secular learning from which Edmund found it hard to 
wean himself. At last, in some hour of dream, the form 
of his dead mother floated into the room where the teacher 
stood among his mathematical diagrams. ‘“ What are 
these?” she seemed to say; and seizing Edmund’s right 
hand, she drew on the palm three circles interlaced, each 
of which bore the name of a Person of the Christian 
Trinity. ‘Be these,” she cried, as the figure faded 
away, “thy diagrams henceforth, my son.” 

The story admirably illustrates the real character of 
the new training, and the latent opposition between the 
spirit of the Universities and the spirit of the Church. 
The feudal and ecclesiastical order of the old medizval 
world were both alike threatened by this power that 
had so strangely sprung up in the midst of them. Feu- 
dalism rested on local isolation, on the severance of 
kingdom from kingdom and barony from barony, on the 
distinction of blood and race, on the supremacy of 
material and brute force, on an allegiance determined by 
accidents of place and social position. The University 
on the other hand was a protest against this isolation of 
man from man. The smallest school was European and 
not local. Not merely every province of France, but 
every people of Christendom had its place among the 
“nations” of Paris or Padua. A common language, 
the Latin tongue, superseded within academical bounds 
_ the warring tongues of Europe. A common intellectual 
kinship and rivalry took the place of the petty strifes 
which parted province from province or realm from 
realm. What Church and Empire had both aimed at 
and both failed in, the knitting of Christian nations 
together into a vast commonwealth, the Universities for 
a time actually did. ya felt himself as little a 

| 3 


194 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


stranger in the “ Latin” quarter round Mont St. Gene- 
viéve as under the arches of Bologna. Wandering Ox- 
ford scholars carried the writings of Wyclif to the 
libraries of Prague. In England the work of provincial 
fusion was less difficult or important than elsewhere, but 
even in England work had to be done. The feuds <f 
Northerner and Southerner which so long disturbed the 
discipline of Oxford witnessed at any rate to the fact 
that Northerner and Southerner had at last been brought 
face to face in its streets. And here as elsewhere the 
spirit of national isolation was held in check by the 
larger comprehensivencss of the University. After the 
dissensions that threatened the prosperity of Paris in 
the thirteenth century Norman and Gascon mingled 
with Englishmen in Oxford lecture-halls. Irish scholars 
were foremost in the fray with the legate. At a later 
time the rising of Owen Glyndwr found hundreds of 
Welshmen gathered round its teachers. And within 
this strangely mingled mass society and government 
rested on a purely democratic basis. Among Oxford 
scholars the son of the noble stood on precisely the same 
footing with the poorest mendicant. Wealth, physical 
strength, skill in arms, pride of ancestry and blood, the 
very grounds on which feudal society vested, went for 
nothing in the lecture-room. The University was a state 
absolutely self-governed, and whose eitizens were ad- 
mitted by a purely intellectual franchise. Knowledge 
made the “ master.’ To know more than one’s fellows 
was a tnan’s sole claim to he a regent or “ruler’’ in 
these schools. And within this intellectual aristocracy 
all were equal. When the free commonwealth of the 
masters gathered in the aisles of St. Mary’s all had an 
equal right to counsel, all had an equal vote in the final - 
decision. Treasury and library were at their complete 
disposal. It was their voice that named every officer, 
that proposed and sanctioned every statute. Even the 
Chancellor, their head, who had at first been an officer 
of the Bishop, became an elected officer of their own. 

If the democratic spirit of the Universities threatened 
feudalism, their spirit of intellectual inquiry threatened 


THE CHARTER. 1204-——1291. 195 


the Church. To all outer seeming they were purely ec- 
clesiastical bodies. The wide extension which medieval 
usage gave to the word “orders” gathered the whole 
educated world within the pale of the clergy. What- 
ever might be their age or proficiency, scholar. and 
teacher alike ranked as clerks, free from lay respon- 
sibilities or the control of civil tribunals, and amenable 
only to the rule of the Bishop and the sentence of his 
spiritual courts. This ecclesiastical character of the 
University appeared in that of itshead. The Chancellor, 
as we have seen, was at first no officer of the University . 
itself, but of the ecclesiastical body under whose shadow 
it had sprung into life. At Oxford he was simply the 
local officer of the Bishop of Lincoln within whose im- 
mense diocese the University was then situated. But 
this identification in outer form with the Church only 
rendered more conspicuous the difference of spirit be- 
tween them. Thesudden expansion of the field of educa- 
tion diminished the importance of those purely ecclesias- 
tical and theological studies which had hitherto absorbed 
the whole intellectual energies of mankind. The revival 
of classical literature, the rediscovery as it were of an older 
and a greater world, the contact with a larger, freer life 
whether in mind, in society, or in politics introduced a 
spirit of skepticism, of doubt, of denial into the realms of 
unquestioning belief. Abelard claimed for reason a su- 
premacy over faith. Florentine poets discussed with a 
smile the immortality of the soul. Even to Dante, while 
he censures these, Vergil is as sacred as Jeremiah. The 
imperial ruler in whom the new culture took its most 
notable form, Frederick the Second, the ‘* World’s Won- 
der” of his time, was regarded by half Europe as no 
better than an infidel. A faint revival of ph¥sical science, 
so long crushed as magic by the dominant ecclesiasticism, 
brought Christians into perilous contact with the Moslem 
and the Jew. The books of the Rabbis were no longer 
an accursed thing to Roger Bacon. Thescholars of Cor- 
dova were no mere Paynim swine to Adelard of Bath. 
How slowly indeed and against what obstacles science won 
its way we know from the witness of Roger Bacon. 


196 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


“ Slowly,” he tells us, “ has any portion of the philosophy 
of Aristotle come into use among the Latins. His Nat- 
ural Philosophy and his Metaphysics, with the Commen- 
taries of Averroes and others, were translated in my time, 
and interdicted at Paris up to the year of grace 1237 be- 
cause of their assertion of the eternity of the world and © 
of time and because of the book of the divinations by 
dreams (which is the third book, De Somniis et Vigiliis) 
and because of many passages erroneously translated. 
Even his logic was slowly received and lectured on. For 
St. Edmund, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was the first 
in my time who read the Elements at Oxford. And I 
have seen Master Hugo, who first read the book of Pos- 
terior Analytics and I have seen his writing. So there 
were but few, considering the multitude of the Latins, 
who were of any account in the philosophy of Aristotle ; 
nay, very few indeed, and scarcely any up to this year of 
grace 1292.” 

If we pass from the English University to the English 
Town we see a progress as important and hardly less in- 
teresting. In their origin our boroughs were utterly 
unlike those of the rest of the western world. The cities 
of Italy and Provence had preserved the municipal insti- 
tutions of their Roman past; the German towns had been 
founded by Henry the Fowler with the purpose of shel- 
tering industry from the feudal oppression around them ; 
the communes of Northern France sprang into existence 
in revolt against feudal outrage within their walls. But 
in England the tradition of Rome passed utterly away, 
while feudal oppression was held fairly in check by the 
Crown. The English town therefore was in its beginning 
simply a piece of the general country, organized and gov- 
erned precisely in the same manner as the townships 
around it. Its existence witnessed indeed to the need 
which men felt in those earlier times of mutual help and 
protection. The burh or borough was probably a more 
-defensible place than the common village; it may have 
had a ditch or mound about it instead of the quickset- 
hedge or ‘‘ tun”’ from which the township took its name. 
But in itself it was simply a township or group of town- 


~, 


THE CHARTER. ' 1204—1291; . TOR 


ships where men clustered whether for trade or defence 
more thickly than elsewhere. The towns were different 
in the circumstances and date of their rise. Some grew 
up in the fortified camps of the English invaders. Some 
dated from a later occupation of the sacked and desolate 
Roman towns. Some clustered round the country houses 
of king and ealdorman or the walls of church and mon- 
astery. Towns like Bristol were the direct result of trade. 
There was the same variety in the mode in which the 
various town communities were formed. While the bulk 
of them grewby simple increase of population from town- 
ship to town, larger boroughs suchas York with its “six 
shires” or London withits wards and sokes and franchises 
show how families and groups of settlers settled down 
side by side, and claimed as they coalesced, each for itself, 
its shire or share of the town-ground while jealously pre- 
serving its individual life within the town-community. 
But strange as these aggregations might be, the constitu- 
tion of the borough which resulted from them was simply 
that of the people at large. Whether we regard it as a 
township, or rather from its size asa hundred or collection - 
of townships, the obligations of the dwellers within its 
bounds were those of the townships round, to keep fence 
and trench in good repair, to send a contingent to the 
fyrd, and a reeve and four men to the hundred court and 
shire court. As in other townships land was a necessary 
accompaniment of freedom. The landless man who 
dwelled in a borough had no share in its corporate life ; 
for purposes of government or property the town con- 
sisted simply of the landed proprietors within its bounds. 
The common lands which are still attached to many of 
our boroughs take us back to a time when each township 
lay within a ring or mark of open ground which served 
at once as boundary and pasture land. Each of the four 
wards of York had its common pasture; Oxford has still 
its own “ Portmeadow.” 

The inner rule of the borough lay as in the townships 
about it in the hands of its own freemen, gathered in 
“ borough-moot ” or “ portmannimote.” But the. social 
change brought about by the Danish wars, the legal re- 


198 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


quirement that each man should have a lord, affected the 
towns as it affected the rest of the country. Some passed 
into the hands of great thegns near to them; the bulk 
became known as in the demesne of the king. A new 
officer, the lord’s or king’s reeve, was a sign of this rev- 
olution. It was the reeve who now summoned the 
borough-moot and administered justice in it; it was he 
who collected the lord’s dues or annual rent of the town, 
and who exacted the services it owed to its lord. To 
modern eyes these services would imply almost complete 
subjection. When Leicester, for instance, passed from 
the hands of the Conqueror into those of its Earls, its 
townsmen were bound to reap their lord’s_ corn-crops, to 
grind at his mill, to redeem their strayed cattle from his 
pound. The great forest around was the Earl's, and it 
was only out of his grace that the little borough could 
drive its swine into the woods or pasture its cattle in the 
glades. The justice and government of a town lay 
wholly in its master’s hands; he appointed its bailiffs, 
received the fines and forfeitures of his tenants, and the 
fees and tolls of their markets and fairs. But in fact 
when once these dues were paid and their services 
rendered the English townsman was practically free. His 
rights were as rigidly defined by custom as those of his 
lord. Property and person alike were secured against 
arbitrary seizure. He could demand a fair trial on any 
charge, and even if justice was administered by his 
master’s reeve it was administered in the presence and 
with the assent of his fellow-townsmen. The bell 
which swung out from the town tower gathered the 
burgesses to a common meeting, where they could exer- 
cise rights of free speech and free deliberation on their 
own affairs. Their merchant-gild over its ale-feast regu- 
lated trade, distributed the sums due from the town 
among the different burgesses, looked to the due repairs 
of gate and wall, and acted in fact pretty much the same 
part as a town-council of to-day. | 

The merchant-gild was the outcome of a tendency to 
closer association which found support in those principles 
of mutual aid and mutual restraint that lay at the base 


t 


’ 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 199 


of our old institutions. Gilds or clubs for religious, 
charitable, or social purposes were common throughout 
the country, and especially common in boroughs, where 
men clustered more thickly together. Each formed a 
sort of artificial family. An oath of mutual fidelity 
among its members was substituted for the tie of blood, 
while the gild-feast, held once a month in the common 
hall, replaced the gathering of the kinsfolk round their 
family hearth. But within this new family the aim of 
the gild was to establish a mutual responsibility as close 
as that of the old. ‘“ Let all share the same lot,” ran its | 
law; ‘if any misdo, let all bear it.” A member could 
look for aid from his gild-brothers in atoning for guilt in- 
curred by mishap. He could call on them for assistance 
in case of violence or wrong. If falsely accused they ap- 
peared in court as his compurgators, if poor they sup- 
ported, and when dead they buried him. On the other 
hand he was responsible to them, as they were to the 
State, for order and obedience to the laws. A wrong of 
brother against brother was also a wrong against the 
general body of the gild and was punished by fine or in 
the last resort by an, expulsion which left the offender a 
“lawless” man and an outcast. ‘The one difference be- 
tween these gilds in country and town was this, that in 
the latter case from their close local neighborhood they 
tended inevitably to coalesce. Under JAtthelstan the 
London gilds united into one for the purpose of carrying 
out more effectually their common aims, and at a later 
time we find the gilds of Berwick enacting ‘ that where 
many bodies are found side by side in one place they 
may become one, and have one will, and in the dealings 
of one with another have a strong and hearty love.” The 
process was probably a long and difficult one, for the 
brotherhoods naturally differed much in social rank, and 
even after the union was effected we see traces of the 
Separate existence to a certain extent of some one or 
more of the wealthier or more aristocratic gilds. In 
London for instance the Knighten-gild which seems to 
have stood at the head of its fellows retained for a long 
time its separate property, while its Alderman—as the 


200 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


chief officer of each gild was called—became the Alder- 
man of the united gild of the whole city. In Canterbury 
we find a similar gild of Thanes from which the chief 
officers of the town seem commonly to have been selected. 
Imperfect however as the union might be, when once it 
was effected the town passed from a mere collection of 
brotherhoods into a powerful community, far more effect- 
ually organized than in the loose organization of the 
township, and whose character was inevitably deter- 
mined by the circumstances of its origin. In their begin- 
nings our boroughs seem to have been mainly gatherings 
of persons engaged in agricultural pursuits; the first 
Dooms of London provide especially for the recovery 
of cattle belonging to the citizens. But as the increas- 
ing security of the country invited the farmer or the 
landowner to settle apart in his own fields, and the growth 
of estate and trade told on the towns themselves, the dif- 
ference between town and country became more sharply 
defined. London of course took the lead in this new de- 
velopment of civic hfe. Even in thelstan’s day every 
London merchant who had made three long voyages on 
his own account ranked as a Thegn. Its “ lithsmen,” or 
shipman’s-gild, were of sufficient importance under Har- 
thacnut to figure in the election of a king, and its prin- 
cipal street still tells of the rapid growth of trade in its 
name of ‘ Cheap-side’ or the bargaining place. But at 
the Norman Conquest the commercial tendency had be- 
come universal, The name given to the united brother- 
hood in a borough is in almost every case no longer that 
of the ‘ town-gild,’ but of the ‘ merchant-gild.’ 

This social change in the character of the townsmen 
produced important results in the character of their 
municipal institutions. In becoming a merchant-gild the 
body of citizens who formed the “town” enlarged their 
powers of civic legislation by applying them to the con- 
trol of their internal trade. It became their special busi- 
ness to obtain from the crown or from their lords w‘der 
commercial privileges, rights of coinage, grants of fairs, 
and exemption from tolls, while within the town itself 
they framed regulations as to the sale and quality of 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 201 


goods, the control of markets, and the recovery of debts. 
It was only by slow and difficult advances that each step 
in this securing of privilege was won. Still it went 
steadily on. Whenever we get a glimpse of the inner 
history of an English town we find the same peaceful 
revolution in progress, services disappearing through 
disuse or omission, while privileges and immunities are 
being purchased in hard cash. The lord of the town, 
whether he were king, baron, or abbot, was commonly 
thriftless or poor, and the capture of a noble, or the cam- 
paign of a sovereign, or the building of some new min- 
ster by a prior, brought about an appeal to the thrifty 
burghers, who were ready to fill again their master’s 
treasury at the price of the strip of parchment which 
gave them freedom of trade, of justice, and of govern- 
ment. In the silent growth and elevation of the Eng- 
lish people the boroughs thus led the way. Unnoticed 
and despised by prelate and noble they preserved or won 
back again the full tradition of Teutonic liberty. The 
right of self-government, the right of free speech in free 
meeting, the right to equal justice at the hands of one’s 
equals, were brought safely across ages of tyranny by the 
burghers and shopkeepers of the towns. In the quiet 
quaintly-named streets, in town-mead and market-place, 
in the lord’s mill beside the stream, in the bell that 
swung outits summons to the crowded borough-mote, in 
merchant-gild, and church-gild, lay the life of English- 
men who were doing more than knight and baron to 
make England what she is, the life of their home and 
their trade, of their sturdy battle with oppression, their 
steady, ceaseless struggle for right and freedom. 

London stood first among English towns, and the privi- 
leges which its citizens won became precedents for the 
burghers of meaner boroughs. Even at the Conquest its 
power and wealth secured it a full recognition of all its 
ancient privileges from the Conqueror. In one way in- 
deed it profited by the revolution which laid England at 
the feet of the stranger. One immediate result of Wil- 
liam’s success was an immigration into England from the 
Continent. A peaceful invasion of the Norman traders 


202 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


followed quick on the invasion of the Norman soldiery. 
Every Norman noble as he quartered himself upon Eng- 
lish lands, every Norman abbot as he entered his English 
cloister, gathered French artists, French shopkeepers, 
French domestics about him. Round the Abbey of Bat- 
tle which William founded on the site of his great vic- 
tory ‘“‘ Gilbert the Foreigner, Gilbert the Weaver, Benet 
the Steward, Hugh the Secretary, Baldwin the Tailor,” 
dwelt mixed with the English tenantry. But nowhere 
did these immigrants play so notable a part as in Lon- 
don. The Normans had had mercantile establishments 
in London as early as the reign of /thelred, if not of 
Eadgar. Such settlements however naturally formed 
nothing more than a trading colony like the colony of 
the “ Emperor’s Men,” or Easterlings. But. with the 
Conquest their number greatly increased. “ Many. of 
the citizens of Rouen and Caen passed over thither, pre- 
ferring to be dwellers in this city, inasmuch as it was 
fitter for their trading and better stored with the mer- 
chandise in which they were wont to traffic.” The 
status of these traders indeed had wholly changed. They 
could no longer be looked upon as strangers in cities 
which had passed under the Norman rule.. In some 
cases, as at Norwich, the French colony isolated itself in 
a separate French town, side by side with the English 
borough. But in London it seems to have taken at once 
the position of a governing class. Gilbert Beket, the 
father of the famous Archbishop, was believed in later 
days to have been one of the portreeves of London, the 
predecessors of its mayors; he held in Stephen’s time a 
large property in houses within the walls, and a proof of 
his civic importance was preserved in the annual visit of 
each newly-elected chief magistrate to his tomb in a Little 
chapel which he had founded in the churchyard of St. 
Paul’s. Yet Gilbert was one of the Norman strangers 
who followed in the wake of the Conqueror; he was by 
birth a burgher of Rouen, as his wife was of a burgher 
family from Caen. 

It was partly to this infusion of foreign blood, partly 
no doubt to the long internal peace and order secnred 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 203 


by the Norman rule, that London owed the wealth and 
importance to which it attained during the reign of 
Henry the First. The charter which Henry eranted it 
became a model for lesser boroughs. The King yielded 
its citizens the right of justice; each townsman could 
claim to be tried by his fellow-townsmen in the town- 
court or hustings whose sessions took place every week. 
They were subject only to the old English trial by oath, 
and exempt from the trial by battle which the Normans 
introduced. Their trade was protected from toll or ex- 
action over the length and breadth of the land. The 
King however still nominated in London as elsewhere 
the portreeve, or magistrate of the town, nor were the 
citizens as yet united together in a commune or corpora- 
tion. But an imperfect civic organization existed in the 
““wards” or quarters of the town, each governed by its 
own alderman and in the “gilds”’ or voluntary associa- 
tions of merchants or traders which ensured order and 
mutual protection for their members. Loose too as these 
bonds may seem, they were drawn firmly together by the 
older English traditions of freedom which the towns pre- 
served. The London burgesses gathered in their town- 
mote when the bell swung out from the bell-tower of St. 
Paul’s to deliberate freely on their own affairs under the 
presidency of their alderman. Here too they mustered 
in arms if danger threatened the city, and delivered the 
town-banner to their captain, the Norman baron Fitz- 
Walter, to lead them against the enemy. 

Few boroughs had as yet attained to such power as 
this, but the instance of Oxford shows how the freedom 
of London told on the general advance of English towns. 
In spite of antiquarian fancies it is certain that no town 
had arisen on the site of Oxford for centuries after the 
withdrawal of the Roman legions from the isle of Britain. 
Though the monastery of St. Frideswide rose in the tur- 
moil of the eighth century on the slope which led down 
to a ford across the Thames, it is long before we get a 
glimpse of the borough that must have grown up under 
its walls. The first definite evidence for its existence 
lies in a brief entry of the English Chronicle which re- 


204 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


ealls its seizure by Eadward the Elder, but the form of 
this entry shows that the town was already a consider- 
able one, and in the last wrestle of England with the 
Dane its position on the borders of Mercia and Wessex 
combined with its command of the upper valley of the 
Thames to give it military and political importance. Of 
the life of its burgesses however we still know little or 
nothing. The names of its parishes, St. Aldate, St. 
Ebbe, St. Mildred, St. Edmund, show how early 
church after church gathered round the earlier town- 
church of St. Martin. But the men of the little town 
remain dim to us. Their town-mote, or the “ Port- 
mannimote” as it was called, which was held in the 
churchyard of St. Martin, still lives in a shadow of its 
older self as the Freeman’s Common Hall—their town- 
mead is still the Port-meadow. But it is only by later 
charters or the record of Doomsday that we see them 
going on pilgrimage to the shrines of Winchester, or 
chaffering in their market-place, or judging and law- 
making in their hustings, their merchant-gild regulating 
trade, their reeve gathering his king’s dues of tax or 
mopey or marshalling his troop of burghers for the king’s 
wars, their boats paying toll of a hundred herrings in 
Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon, as they floated 
down the Thames towards London. 

The number of houses marked waste in the survey 
marks the terrible suffering of Oxford in the Norman 
Conquest: but the ruin was soon repaired, and the erec 
tion of its castle, the rebuilding of its churches, the plant- 
ing of a Jewry in the heart of the town, showed in what 
various ways the energy of its new masters was giving an 
impulse to its life. It is a proof of the superiority of the 
Hebrew dwellings to the Christian houses about them that 
each of the later town-halls of the borough had, before 
their expulsion, been houses of Jews. Nearly all the 
larger dwelling houses in fact which were subsequently 
converted into academic halls bore traces of the same 
origin in names such as Moysey’s’Hall, Lombard’s Hall, 
or Jacob’s Hall. The Jewish houses were abundant, for 
besides the greater Jewry in the heart of it, there was a 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 205 


lesser Jewry scattered over its southern quarter, and we 
can hardly doubt that this abundance of substantial 
buildings in the town was at least one of the causes which 
drew teachers and scholars within its walls. The J ewly, 
a town within a town, lay here as elsewhere isolated and 
exempt from the common justice, the common life and 
self-government of the borough. On all but its eastern 
side too the town was hemmed in by jurisdictions in- 
dependent of its own. The precincts of the Abbey of 
Osney, the wide “bailey” of the Castle, bounded it 
narrowly on the west. To the north, stretching away 
beyond the little church of St. Giles, lay the fields of the 
royal manor of Beaumont. The Abbot of Abingdon, 
whose woods of Cumnor and Bagley closed the southern 
horizon, held his leet-court in the hamlet of Grampound 
beyond the bridge. Nor was the whole space within the 
walls subject to the self-government of the citizens. The 
Jewry had a rule and law of its own. Scores of house- 
holders, dotted over street and lane, were tenants of castle 
or abbey and paid no suit or service at the borough court. 

But within these narrow bounds and amidst these 
various obstacles the spirit of municipal liberty lived a 
life the more intense that it was so closely cabined and 
confined. Nowhere indeed was the impulse which London 
was giving likely to tell with greater force. The “ barge- 
men’ of Oxford were connected even before the Con- 
quest with the “boatmen,” or shippers, of the capital. 
In both cases it is probable that the bodies bearing these 
names represented what is known as the merchant-gild 
of the town. Royal recognition enables us to trace the 
merchant-gild of Oxford from the time of Henry the 
First. Even then lands, islands, pastures belonged to it, 
aud amongst them the same Port-meadow which is famil- 
iar to Oxford men pulling lazily on a summer's noon to 
Godstow. The connexion between the two gilds was pri- 
marily one of trade. “In the time of King Eadward and 
Abbot Ordric” the channel of the Thames beneath the 
walls of the Abbey of Abingdon became so blocked up 
that boats could scarce pass as far as Oxford, and it was 
at the joint prayer of the burgesses of London and Ox- 


206 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


ford that the abbot dug a new channel through the mea- 
dow to the south of his church. But by the time of 
Henry the Second closer bonds than this linked the two 
cities together. In case of any doubt or contest about 
judgments in their own court the burgesses of Oxford 
were empowered to refer the matter to the decision of 
London, ‘‘and whatsoever the citizens of London shall 
adjudge in such cases shall be deemed right.” The judi- 
cial usages, the municipal rights of each city were as- 
similated by Henry’s charter. ‘ Of whatsoever matter 
the men of Oxford be put in plea, they shall deraign 
themselves according to the law and custom of the city 
_ of London and not otherwise, because they and the citi- 
zens of London are of one and the same custom, law, and 
liberty.” 

A legal connexion such as this could hardly fail to bring 
with it an identity of municipal rights. Oxford had 
already passed through the earlier steps of her advance 
towards municipal freedom before the conquest of the 
Norman. Her burghers assembled in their own Portman- 
nimote, and their dues to the crown were assessed at a 
fixed sum of money or coin. But the formal definition of 
their rights dates, as in the case of London, from the 
time of Henry the First. The customs and exemptions 
of its townsmen were confirmed by Henry the Second “ as 
ever they enjoyed them in the time of Henry my grand- 
father and in like manner as my citizens of London hold 
them.” By this date the town had attained entire ju- 
dicial and commercial freedom, and liberty of external 
commerce was secured by the exemption of its citizens 
from toll on the king’s lands. Complete independence 
was reached when a charter of John substituted a mayor 
of the town’s own choosing for the reeve or bailiff of the 
crown. But dry details such as these tell little of the 
quick pulse of popular life that beat in the thirteenth 
century through such a community as that of Oxford. 
The church of St. Martin in the very heart of it, at the 
“ Quatrevoix”’ or Carfax where its four streets met, was 
the centre of the city hfe. The town-mote was held in 
its churchyard. Justice was administered ere yet a town- 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 207 


hall housed the infant magistracy by mayor or bailiff sit- 
ting beneath a low-pent house, the “ penniless bench” of 
later days, outside its eastern wall. Its bell summoned 
the burghers to council or arms. Around the church the 
trade-gilds were ranged as in some vast en campment. To 
the south of it lay Spicery and Vintnery, the quarter of 
the richer burgesses. Fish-street fell noisily down to 
the bridge and the ford. The Corn-market occupied then 
as now the street which led to Northgate. The stalls of 
the butchers stretched along the “ Butcher-row,” which 
formed the road to the bailey and the castle. Close be- 
neath the church lay a nest of huddled Janes, broken by 
a stately synagogue, and traversed from time to time by 
the yellow gaberdine of the Jew. Soldiers from the 
eastle rode clashing through the narrow streets; the 
bells of Osney clanged from the swampy meadows; pro- 
cessions of pilgrims wound through gates and lane to the 
shrine of St. Frideswide. Frays were common enough ; 
now the sack of a Jew’s house; now burgher drawing 
knife on burgher ; now an outbreak of the young student 
lads who were growing every day in numbers and audacity. 
But as yet the town was well in hand. The clang ofthe 
city bell called every citizen to his door; the call of the 
mayor brought trade after trade with bow in hand and 
banners flying to enforce the king’s peace. 

The advance of towns which had grown up not on the 
royal domain but around abbey or castle was slower and 
more difficult. The story of St. Edmundsbury shows how 
gradual was the transition from pure serfage to an im- 
perfect freedom. Much that had been plough-land here 
in the Confessor’s time was covered with houses by the 
time of Henry the Second. The building of the great 
abbey-church drew its craftsmen and masons to mingle 
with the ploughmen and reapers of the Abbot’s domain. 
The troubles of the time helped here as elsewhere the 
progress of the town; serfs, fugitives from justice or 
their lord, the trader, the Jew, naturally sought shelter 
under the strong hand of St. Edmund. But the settlers 
were wholly at the Abbot’s mercy. Not a settler but 
was bound to pay his pence to the Abbot’s treasury, to 


208 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


plough a rod of his land, to reap in his harvest-field, to 
fold his sheep in the Abbey folds, to help bring the annual 
catch of eels from the Abbey waters. Within the four 
crosses that bounded the Abbey’s domain land and water 
-were his; the cattle of the townsmen paid for their 
pasture on the common; if the fullers refused the loan of 
their cloth the cellarer would refuse the use ofthe stream 
and seize their looms wherever he found them. No toll 
might be levied from tenants of the Abbey faims, and cus- 
tomers had to wait before shop and stall till the buyers of 
the Abbey had had the pick of the market. There was 
little chance of redress, for if burghers complained in folk- 
mote it was before the Abbot’s officers that its meeting 
was held; if they appealed to the alderman he was the 
Abbot’s nominee and received the horn, the symbol of his 
office, at the Abbot’s hands. Like all the greater revo 
lutions of society, the advance from this mere serfage was 4 
silent one; indeed its more galling instances of oppression 
seemed to have slipped unconsciously away. Some, like 
the eel-fishing, were commuted for an easy rent; others, 
like the slavery of the fullers and the toll of flax, simply 
disappeared. By usage, by omission, by downright for- 
cetfulness, here by a little struggle, there by a present to 
a needy abbot, the town won freedom. 

But progress was not always unconscious, and one in- 
cident in the history of St. Edmundsbury is remarkable, 
not merely as indicating the advance of law, but yet more 
as marking the part which a new moral sense of man’s 
right to equal justice was to play in the general advance 
of the realm. Rude as the borough was, it possessed the 
right of meeting in full assembly of the townsmen for 
government and law. Justice was administered in pres- 
ence of the burgesses, and the accused acquitted or con- 
demned by the oath of his neighbors. Without the 
borough bounds however the system of Norman judica- 
ture prevailed ; and the rural tenants who did suit and 
service at the Cellarer’s court were subjected to the trial 
by battle. The execution of a farmer named Kebel who 
came under this feudal jurisdiction brought the two sys- 
tems into vivid contrast. Kebel seems to have been guilt- 


“THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 209 


less of the crime laid to his charge; but the duel went 
against him and he was hung just without the gates. 
The taunts of the townsmen woke his fellow farmers to a 
sense of wrong. ‘ Had Kebel been a dweller within the 
borough,” said the burgesses, “ he would have got his ac- | 
quittal from the oaths of his neighbors, as our liberty is ;” 
and even the monks were moved to a decision that their 
tenants should enjoy equal freedom and justice with the 
townsmen. ‘The franchise of the town was extended to 
the rural possessions of the Abbey without it; the farmers 
“came to the toll-house, were written in the alderman’s. 
toll, and paid the town-penny.” A chance story pre- 
served in a charter of later date shows the same struggle 
for justice going on in a greater town. At Leicester the 
trial by compurgation, the rough predecessor of trial by 
jury, had been abolished by the Earls in favor of trial by 
battle. The aim of the burgesses was to regain their 
old justice, and in this a touching incident at last made 
them successful. ‘It chanced that two kinsmen, Nicholas 
the son of Acon and Geoffrey the son of Nicholas, waged 
a duel about a certain piece of land concerning which a 
dispute had arisen between them; and they fought from 
the first to the ninth hour, each conquering by turns. 
Then one of them fleeing from the other till he came toa 
certain little pit, as he stood on the brink of the pit and 
was about to fall therein, his kinsman said to him ‘ Take 
care of the pit, turn back, lest thou shouldest fall into it.’ 
Thereat so much clamor and noise was made by the 
bystanders and those who were sitting around that the 
Earl heard these clamors as far off as the castle, and he 
enquired of some how it was there was such a clamor, and 
answer was made to him that two kinsmen were fighting 
about a certain piece of ground, and that one had fled 
till he reached a certain little pit, and that as he stood 
over the pit and was about to fall intoit the other warned 
him. Then the townsmen being moved with pity, made 
a covenant with the Earl that they should give him three- 
pence yearly for each house in the High Street that had 
a gable, on condition that he should grant to them that 
the twenty-four jurors who were in Leicester from ancient 


210 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


times should from that time forward discuss and decide 
all pleas they might have among themselves.” 

At the time we have reached this struggle for emanci- 
pation was nearly over. ‘The larger towns had secured 
the privilege of self-government, the administration of 
justice, and the control of their own trade. The reigns 
of Richard and John mark the date in our municipal 
history at which towns began to acquire the right of 
electing their own chief magistrate, the Portreeve or 
Mayor, who had till then been a nominee of the crown. 
But with the close of this outer struggle opened an inner 
struggle between the various classes of the townsmen 
themselves, The growth of wealth and industry was 
bringing with it a vast increase of population. The 
mass of the new settlers, composed as they were of 
escaped serfs, of traders without landed holdings, of 
families who had lost their original lot in the borough, 
and generally of the artisans and the poor, had no part 
in the actual life of the town. The right of trade and of 
the regulation of trade in common with all other forms 
of jurisdiction lay wholly in the hands of the landed 
burghers whom we have described. By a natural process 
too their superiority in wealth produced a fresh division © 
between the “ burghers” of the merchant-gild and the 
unenfranchised mass around them. The same change 
which severed at Florence the seven Greater Arts or 
trades from the fourteen Lesser Arts, and which raised 
the three occupations of banking, the manufacture and 
the dyeing of cloth, to a position of superiority even — 
within the privileged circle of the seven, told though 
with less force on the English boroughs. The burghers 
of the merchant-gild gradually concentrated themselves 
on the greater operations of commerce, on trades which 
required a larger capital, while the meaner employments 
of general traffic were abandoned to their poorer neigh- 
bors. This advance in the division of labor ismarked by 
such severances as we note in the thirteenth century of 
the cloth merchant from the tailor or the leather mer- 
chant from the butcher. 

But the result of this severance was all important in 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 211 


its influence on the constitution of our towns. The 
members of the trades thus abandoned by the wealthier 
burghers formed themselves into Craft-gilds which soon 
rose into dangerous rivalry with the original Merchant- 
gild of the town. A seven years’ apprenticeship formed 
the necessary prelude to full membership of these trade- 
gilds. Theirregulations were of the minutest character ; 
the quality and value of work were rigidly prescribed, 
the hours of toil fixed “ from day-break to curfew,” and 
strict provision made against competition in labor. At 
each meeting of these gilds their members gathered round 
the Craft-box which contained the rules of their Society, 
and stood with bared heads as it was opened. The 
warden anda quorum of gild-brothers formed a court 
which enforced the ordinances of the gild, inspected all 
works done by its members, confiscated unlawful tools 
or unworthy goods; and disobedience to their orders 
was punished by fines or in the last resort by expulsion, 
which involved the loss of a right to trade. A common 
fund was raised by contributions among the members, 
which not only provided for the trade objects of the gild 
but sufficed to found chantries and masses, and set up 
painted windows in the church of their patron saint. 
Even at the present day the arms of a craft-gild may 
often be seen blazoned in cathedrals side by side with 
those of prelates and of kings. But it was only by slow 
degrees that they rose to sucha height as this. The first 
steps in their existence were the most difficult, for to 
enable a trade-gild to carry out its objects with any 
success it was first necessary that the whole body of 
craftsmen belonging to the trade should be compelled to 
join the gild, and secondly that a legal control over the 
trade itself should be secured to it. A royal charter was 
indispensable for these purposes, and over the grant of 
these charters took place the first struggleawithathe mer- 
chant-gilds which had till then solely exercised jurisdic- 
tion over trade within the boroughs. The weavers, who 
were the first trade-cild to secure royal sanction in the 
reign of Henry the First, were still engaged in a. contest 
for existence as late as the reign of John when the 


212 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


citizens of London bought for a time the suppression of 
their gild. Even under the House of Lancaster Exeter 
was engaged in resisting the establishment of a tailor’s 
gild. From the eleventh century however the spread of 
these societies went steadily on, and the control of trade 
passed more and-more from the merchant-gilds to the 
craft-gilds. 

It is this struggle, to use the technical terms of the 
time, of the “ greater folk ” against the “lesser folk,” or 
of the “ commune,” the general mass of the inhabitants, 
against the ‘prudhommes,” or ‘ wiser” few, which 
brought about, as it passed from the regulation of trade 
to the general government to the town, the great civic 
revolution of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 
On the Continent, and especially along the Rhine, the 
struggle was as fierce as the supremacy of the older 
burghers had been complete. In Kéln the craftsmen 
had been reduced to all but serfage, and the merchant of 
Brussels might box at his will the ears of “the man 
without heart or honor who lives by his toil.” Such 
social tyranny of class over class brought a century of 
bloodshed to the cities of Germany ; but in England the 
tyranny of class over class was restrained by the general 
tenor of the law, and the revolution took for the most part 
a milder form. The longest and bitterest strife of all was 
naturally at London. Nowhere had the territorial con- 
stitution struck root sodeeply, and no where had the 
landed oligarchy risen to such a height of wealth and in- 
fluence. ‘The city was divided into wards, each of which 
was governed by analderman drawn from the ruling class. 
In some indeedthe office seems to have become hereditary. 
The “ magnates,” or “ barons,” of the merchant-gild ad- 
vised alone on all matters of civic government or trade 
regulation, and distributed or assessed at their will the 
revenues or burdens of the town. Sucha position afforded 
ai. opening for corruption and oppression of the most gall- 
ing kind; anditseems to have been a general impression 
of the unfair assessment of the dues levied on the poor 
and the undue burdens which were thrown on the unen- 
franchised classes which provoked the first serious dis- 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 213 


content. In the reign of Richard the First William of 
the Long Beard, though one of the governing body, 
placed himself at the head of a conspiracy which in the 
panic-stricken fancy of the burghers numbered fifty 
thousand of the craftsmen. His eloquence, his bold de- 
fiance of the alderman in the town-mote, gained him at 
any rate a wide popularity, and the crowds who sur- 
rounded him hailed him as “the saviour of the poor.” 
One of his addresses is luckily preserved to us by a hearer 
of the time. In medieval fashion he began with a text 
from the Vulgate, “ Ye shall draw water with joy from. 
the fountain of the Saviour.” “I,” he began, ‘am the 
saviour of the poor. Ye poor men who have felt the 
weight of rich men’s hands, draw from my fountain 
waters of wholesome instruction and that with joy, for 
the time of your visitation is at hand. For I will divide 
the waters from the waters. Itis the people who are the 
waters, and I will divide the lowly and faithful folk from 
the proud and faithless folk; I will part the chosen from 
the reprobate as light from darkness.” But it was in 
vain that he strove to win royal favor for the popular 
cause. The support of the moneyed classes was essential 
to Richard in the costly wars with Philip of France ; and 
the Justiciar, Archbishop Hubert, after a moment of 
hesitation issued orders for William Longbeard’s arrest. 
William felled with an axe the first soldier who advanced 
to seize him, and taking refuge with a few adherents in 
the tower of St. Mary-le-Bow summoned his adherents 
to rise. Hubert however, who had already flooded the 
city with troops, with bold contempt of the right of sanc- 
tuary set fire to the tower. William was forced to sur- 
render, and a burgher’s son, whose father he had slain, 
stabbed him as he came forth. With his death the quar- 
rel slumbered for more than fifty years. But the move- 
ment towards equality went steadily on. Under pretext 
of preserving the peace the unenfranchised townsmen 
united in secret frith-gilds of their own, and mobs rose 
from time to time to sack the houses of foreigners and the 
wealthier burgesses. Nor did London stand alone in 
this movement. In all the larger towns the same discon- 


- 


214 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


tent prevailed, the same social growth called for new in- 
stitutions, and in their silent revolt against the oppres- 
sion of the Merchant-gild the Craft-gilds were training 
themselves to stand forward as champions of a wider 
liberty in the Barons’ War. 

Without the towns progress was far slower and more 
fitful. It would seem indeed that the conquest of the 
Norman bore harder on the rural population than on any 
other class of Englishmen. Under the later kings of the 
house of Ailfred the number of absolute slaves and the 
number of freemen had alike diminished. The pure slave 
class had never been numerous, ahd it had been reduced 
by the efforts of the Church, perhaps by the general con- 
vulsion of the Danish wars. But these wars had often 
driven the ceorl or freeman of the township to “ com- 
mend” himself to a thegn who pledged him his protection 
in consideration of payment in a rendering of labor. 
It is probable that these dependent ceorls are the ‘villeins’ 
of the Norman epoch, the most numerous class of the 
Domesday Survey, men sunk indeed from pure freedom 
and bound both to soil and lord, but as yet preserving 
much of their older rights, retaining their land, free as 
against all men but their lord, and still sending repre- 
sentatives to hundred-moot and shire-moot. They stood 
therefore far above the “landless man,’ the man who 
had never possessed even under the old constitution po- 
litical rights, whom the legislation of the English Kings 
had forced to attach himself to a lord on pain of outlawry, - 
aid who served as household servant or as hired laborer 
or at the best as rent-paying tenant of land which was 
not his own. The Norman knight or lawyer however 
saw little distinction between these classes ; and the ten- 
dency of legislation under the Angevins was to blend all 
in a single class of serfs. While the pure ‘theow’ or 
absolute slave disappeared therefore the ceorl or villein 
sink lower in the social scale. But though the rural 
population was undoubtedly thrown more together and 
fused into a more homogeneous class, its actual position 
corresponded very imperfectly with the view of the law- 
yers. All indeed were dependents on a lord. The manor- 


THE CHARTER. 1201—1291. O16 


house became the centre of every English village. The 
manor-court was held in its hall; it was here that the lord 
or his steward received homage, recovered fines, held the 
view of frank-pledge, or enrolled the villagers in their 
tithing. Here too,if the lord possessed criminal juris- 
diction, was held his justice court, and without its doors 
stood his gallows. Around it lay the lord’s demesne or 
home-farm, aud the cultivation of this rested wholly with 
the + villeins” of the manor. It was by them that the 
great barn was filled with sheaves, the sheep shorn, the 
grain malted, the wood hewn for the manor-hall fire, 
These services were the labor-rent by which they held 
their lands, and it was the nature and extent of this 
labor-rent which parted one class of the population from 
another. The ‘villein,’ in the strict sense of the word, 
was bound only to gather in his lord’s harvest and to aid 
in the ploughing and sowing of autumn and Lent. The 
cottar, the bordar, and the laborer were bound to help in 
the work of the home-farm throughout the year. 

But these services and the time of rendering them were 
strictly limited by custom, not only in the case of the 
ceorl or villein but in that of the originally meaner “ land- 
less man.” The possession of his litt}e homestead with the 
ground around it, the privilege of turning out his cattle 
on the waste of the manor, passed quietly and insensibly 
from mere indulgences that could be granted or with- 
drawn at a lord’s caprice into rights that could be pleaded 
at law. The number of teams, the fines, the reliefs, the 
services that a lord could claim, at first mere matter of 
oral tradition, came to be entered on the court-roll of the 
manor, a copy of which became the title-deed of the 
villein. It was to this that he owed the name of “ copy- 
holder” which at a later time superseded his older title. 
Disputes were settled by a reference to this roll or on 
oral evidence of the custom at issue, but a social arrange- 
ment which was eminently characteristic of the English 
spirit of compromise generally secured a fair adjustment 
of the claims of villein and lord. It was the duty ofthe 
lord’s bailiff to exact their due services from the villeins, 
but his coadjutor in this office, the reeve or foreman of 


916 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the manor, was chosen by the tenants themselves and 
acted as representative of their interests and rights. A 
fresh step towards freedom was made by the growing 
tendency to commute labor-services for money-payments. 
The population was slowly increasing, and as the law of 
eavel-kind which-was applicable to all landed estates not 
held by military tenure divided the inheritance of the 
tenantry equally among their sons the holding of each 
tenant and the services due from it became divided in a 
corresponding degree. <A labor-rent thus became more 
difficult to enforce, while the increase of wealth among 
the tenantry and the rise of anew spirit of independence 
made it more burdensome to those who rendered it. It 
was probably from this cause that the commutation of 
the arrears of labor for a money payment, which had 
long prevailed on every estate, gradually developed into 
a general commutation of services. We have already 
witnessed the silent progress of this remarkable change 
in the case of St. Edmundsbury, but the practice soon 
became universal, and “malt-silver,” ‘ wood-silver,” and 
‘“‘larder-silver” gradually took the place of the older 
personal services on the court-rolls. ‘The process of com- 
mutation was hastened by the necessities of the lords 
themselves. The luxury of the castle-hall, the splendor 
and pomp of chivalry, the cost of campaigne drained the 
purses of knight and baron, and the sale of freedom to a 
serf or exemption from services to a villein afforded an 
easy and tempting mode of refilling them. In this pro- 
cess even Kings took part. At a later time, under Ed- 
ward the Third, commissioners were sent to royal estates 
for the especial purpose of selling manumissions to the 
King’s serfs; and we still possess the names of those who 
were enfranchised with their families by a payment of 
hard cash in aid of the exhausted exchequer. 

Such was the people which had been growing into a 
national unity and a national vigor while English king 
and English baronage battled for rule. But king and 
baronage themselves had changed like townsman and 
ceorl. The loss of Normandy, entailing as it did the loss 
of their Norman lands, was the last of many influences 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. OT. 


which had been given through a century and a half a 
national temper to the baronage. Not only the “new 
men,” the ministers out of whom the two Henrys had 
raised a nobility, were bound to the Crown, but the older 
feudal houses now owned themselves as Englishmen and 
set aside their aims after personal independence for a love 
of the general freedom of the land. They stood out as 
the natural leaders. of a people bound together by the 
stern government which had crushed all local division, 
which had accustomed men to the enjoyment of a peace 
and justice that imperfect as it seems to modern eyes was 
almost unexampled elsewhere in Europe, and which had 
trained them to something of their old free government 
again by the very machinery of election it used to facili- 
tate its heavy taxation. On the other hand the loss of 
Normandy brought home the King. The growth which 
had been going on had easily escaped the eyes of rulers 
who were commonly absent from the realm and busy 
with the affairs of countries beyond the sea. Henry the 
Second had been absent for years from England; Rich- 
ard had only visited it twice for a few months: John 
had as yet been almost wholly occupied with his foreign 
dominions. To him as to his brother England had as 
yet been nothing but a land whose gold paid the merce- 
naries that followed him, and whose people bowed obedi- 
ently to his will. It was easy to see that between such 
aruler and such a nation once brought together strife 
must come: but that the strife came as it did and ended 
as it did was due above all to the character of the King. 

“ Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fouler pres- 
ence of John.’ The terrible verdict of his contem- 
poraries has passed into the sober judgment of history. 
Externally John possessed all the quickness, the vivacity, 
the cleverness, the good-humor, the social charm which 
distinguished his house. His worst enemies owned that 
he toiled steadily and closely at the work of administra- 
tion. He was fond of learned men like Gerald of Wales. 
He had a strange gift of attracting friends and of win- 
ning the love of women. But in his inner soul John was- 
the worst outcome of the Angevins. He united into one 


218 ~° HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


mass of wickedness their insolence, their selfishness, 
their unbridled lust, their cruelty and tyranny, their 
shamelessness, their superstition, their cynical indiffer- 
ence to honor or truth. In mere boyhood he tore with 
brutal levity the beards of the Irish chieftains who came 
to own him as their lord. His ingratitude and perfidy 
brought his father with sorrow to the grave. To his 
brother he was the worst of traitors. All Christendom 
believed him to be the murderer of his nephew, Arthur 
of Britanny. He abandoned one wife and was faith- 
less to another. His punishments were refinements of 
cruelty, the starvation of children, the crushing old men 
under copes of lead. His court was a brothel where no 
woman was safe from the royal lust, and where his 
cynicism loved to publish the news of his victims’ shame. 
He was as craven in his superstition as he was daring in 
his impiety. Though he scoffed at priests and turned 
his back on the mass even amidst the solemnities of his 
coronation he never stirred on a journey without hang- 
ing relics round his neck. But with the wickedness of 
his race he inherited its profound ability. His plan for 
the relief of Chateau Gaillard, the rapid march by which 
he shattered Arthur’s hopes at Mirabel, showed an in- 
born genius for war. In the rapidity and breadth of his 
political combinations he far surpassed the statesmen of 
his time. Throughout his reign we see him quick to 
discern the difficulties of his position, and inexhaustible 
in the resources with which he met them. The over- 
throw of his continental power only spurred him to the 
formation of a league which all but brought Philip to 
the ground; and the sudden revolt of England was par- 
ried by a shameless alliance with the Papacy. The 
closer study of John’s history clears away the charges of 
sloth and incapacity with which men tried to explain 
the greatness of his fall. The awful lesson of his life 
rests on the fact that the king who lost Normandy, be- 
came the vassal of the Pope, and perished in a struggle 
of despair against English freedom was no weak and 
indolent voluptuary but the ablest and most ruthless of 
the Angevins. 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 219 


From the moment of his return to England in 1204 
John’s whole energies were bent to the recovery of his 
dominions on the Continent. He impatiently collected 
money and men for the support of those adherents of the 
House of Anjou who were still struggling against the 
arms of France in Poitou and Guienne, and in the sum- 
mer of 1205 he gathered an army at Portsmouth and 
prepared to cross the Channel. But his project was sud- 
denly thwarted by the resolute opposition of the Primate, 
Hubert Walter, and the Earl of Pembroke, William 
Marshal. So completely had both the baronage and | 
the Church been humbled by his father that the attitude 
of their representatives revealed to the King a new spirit 
of national freedom which was rising around him, and 
John at once braced himself to a struggle with it. The 
death of Hubert Walter in July, only a few days after 
his protest, removed his most formidable opponent, and 
the King resolved to neutralize the opposition of the 
Church by placing a creature of his own at its head. 
John de Grey, Bishop of Norwich, was elected by the 
monks of Canterbury at his bidding, and enthroned as 
Primate. But in a previous though informal gathering 
the convent had already chosen its sub-prior, Reginald, 
as Archbishop. The rival claimants hastened to appeal 
to Rome, and their appeal reached the Papal Court be- 
fore Christmas. The result of the contest was a start- 
ling one both for themselves and for the King. After a 
year’s careful examination Innocent the Third, who now 
occupied the Papal throne, quashed at the close of 1206 
both the contested elections. The decision was probably 
-ajust one, but Innocent was far from stopping there. 
The monks who appeared before him brought powers 
from the convent to choose a new Primate should their 
earlier nomination be set aside; and John, secretly 
assured of their choice of Grey, had promised to confirm 
their election. But the bribes which the King lavished 
at Rome failed to win the Pope over to this plan; and 
whether from mere love of power, for he was pushing 
the Papal claims of supremacy over Christendom. further 
than any of his predecessors, or as may fairly be sup- 


290 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


posed in despair of a free election within English 
bounds, Innocent commanded the monks to elect in his 
presence Stephen Langton to the archiepiscopal see. 
Personally a better choice could not have been made, 
for Stephen was a man who by sheer weight of learning 


-and holiness of life had risen to the dignity of Cardinal 


and whose after career placed him in the front rank of 
English patriots. But in itself the step was an usurpa- 
tion of the rights both of the Church and of the Crown. 
The King at once met it with resistance. When Innocent 
consecrated the new Primate in June, 1207, and threat- 
ened the realm with interdict if Langton were any longer 
excluded from his see, John replied by a counter threat 
that the interdict should be followed by the banishment 
of the clergy and the mutilation of every Italian he could 
seize in the realm. How little he feared the priesthood 
he showed when the clergy refused his demand of a 
thirteenth of movables for the whole country and Arch- 
bishop Geoffry of York resisted the tax before the Coun- 
cil. John banished the Archbishop and extorted the 
money. Innocent however was not a man to draw back 
from his purpose, and in March 1208 the interdict he had 
threatened fell upon the land. All worship save that of 
a few privileged orders, all administration of Sacraments 
save that of private baptism, ceased over the length and 
breadth of the country: the church-bells were silent, the 
dead lay unburied on the ground. Many of the bishops _ 
fled from the country. The Church in fact, so long the 
main support of the royal power against the baronage, 
was now driven into opposition. Its change of attitude 
was to be of vast moment in the struggle which was im- 
pending: but John recked little of the future ; he replied ~ 
to the interdict by confiscating the lands of the clergy 
who observed it, by subjecting them in spite of their priv- 
ileges to the royal courts, and by leaving outrages on 
them unpunished. ‘“ Let him go,” said John, when a 
Welshman was brought before him for the murder of a 
priest, “he has killed my enemy.” In 1209 the Pope 
proceeded to the further sentence of excommunication, 
and the King was formally cut off from the pale of the 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 221 


Church. But the new sentence was met with the same 
defiance as the old. Five of the bishops fled over sea, 
and secret disaffection was spreading widely, but there 
was no public avoidance of the excommunicated King. 
An Archdeacon of Norwich who withdrew from his 
service was crushed to death under a cope of lead, and 
the hint was sufficient to prevent either prelate or noble 
from following his example. 

The attitude of John showed the power which the ad- 
ministrative reforms of his father had given to the Crown. 
He stood alone, with nobles estranged from him and the 
Church against him, but his strength seemed utterly un- 
broken. From the first moment of his rule John had 
defied the baronage. The promise to satisfy their demand 
for redress of wrongs in the past reign, a promise made 
at his election, remained unfulfilled ; when the demand 
was repeated he answered it by seizing their castles and 
taking their children as hostages for their loyalty. The 
cost of his fruitless threats of war had been met by heavy 
and repeated taxation, by increased land tax and in- 
creased scutage. The quarrel with the Church and fear 
of their revolt only deepened his oppression of the nobles. 
He drove De Braose, one of the most powerful of the 
Lords Marchers, to die in exile, while his wife and grand- 
children were believed to have been starved to death in 
the royal prisons. On the nobles who still clung panic- 
stricken to the court of the excommunicate king John 
heaped outrages worse than death. Illegal exactions, 
the seizure of their castles, the preference shown to for- 
eigners, were small provocations compared with his 
attacks on the honor of their wives and daughters. But 
the baronage still submitted. The financial exactions 
indeed became light as John filled his treasury with the 
goods of the Church; the King’s vigor was seen in the 
rapidity with which he crushed:a rising of the nobles in 
Ireland and foiled an outbreak of the Welsh; while the 
triumphs of his father had taught the baronage its weak- 
ness in any single-handed struggle against the Crown. 
Hated therefore as he was the land remained still. Only 
one weapon was now left in Innocent’s hands. Men 


909 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


held then that a King, once excommunicate, ceased to 
be a Christian or to have claims on the obedience of 
Christian subjects. As spiritual heads of Christendom, 
the Popes had ere now asserted their right to remove 
such a ruler from his throne and to give it to a worthier 
than he; and it was this right which Innocent at last 
felt himself driven to exercise. After useless threats he 
issued in 1212 a bull of deposition against John, absolved 
his subjects from their allegiance, proclaimed a crusade 
against him as an enemy to Christianity and the Church, 
and committed the execution of the sentence to the King 
of the French. John met the announcement of this step 
with the same scorn as before. His insolent disdain suf- 
fered the Roman legate, Cardinal Pandulf, to proclaim 
his deposition to his face at Northampton. When Philip 
collected an army for an attack on England an enormous 
host gathered at the King’s call on Barham Down; and 
the English fleet dispelled all danger of invasion by 
crossing the Channel, by capturing a number of French 
ships, and by burning Dieppe. 
But it was not in England only that the King showed 
his strength and activity. Vile as he was, John possessed 
in a high degree the political ability of his race, and in 
the diplomatic efforts with which he met the danger from 
France he showed himself his father’s equal. The barons 
of Poitou were roused to attack Philip from the south. 
John bought the aid of the Count of Flanders on his 
northern border. The German King, Otto, pledged him- 
self to bring the knighthood of Germany to support an 
invasion of France. But at the moment of his success in 
diplomacy John suddenly gave way. It was in fact the 
revelation of a danger at home which shook him from his 
attitude of contemptuous defiance. The bull of deposi- 
tion gave fresh energy to every enemy. The Scotch 
King was in correspondence with Innocent. The Welsh 
princes who had just been forced to submission broke out 
again in war. John hanged their hostages, and called | 
his host to muster for a fresh inroad into Wales, but the 
army met only to become a fresh source of danger. 
Powerless to oppose the King openly, the baronage had 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 223 


plunged almost to a man into secret conspiracies. The 
hostility of Philip had dispelled their dread of isolated 
action ; many indeed had even promised aid to the French 
King on his landing. John found himself in the midst 
of hidden enemies; and nothing could have saved him 
but the haste—whether of panic or quick decision— 
with which he disbanded his army and took refuge in 
Nottingham Castle. The arrest of some of the barons 
showed how true were his fears, for the heads of the 
French conspiracy, Robert Fitzwalter and Eustace de 
Vesci, at once fled over sea to Philip. His daring self- 
confidence, the skill of his diplomacy, could no longer 
hide from John the utter loneliness of his position. At 
war with Rome, with France, with Scotland, Ireland 
and Wales, at war with the Church, he saw himself dis- 
armed by this sudden revelation of treason in the one 
force left at his disposal. With characteristic sudden- 
ness he gave way. He endeavored by remission of fines 
to win back his people. He negotiated eagerly with the 
Pope, consented toreceive the Archbishop, and promised 
to repay the money he had extorted from the Church. 
But the shameless ingenuity of the King’s temper was 
seen in his resolve to find in his very humiliation a new 
source of strength. If he yielded to the Church he had 
no mind to yield to the rest of his foes ; it was indeed in 
the Pope who had defeated him that he saw the means 
of baffling their efforts. It was Rome that formed the 
link between the varied elements of hostility which com- 
bined against him. It was Rome that gave its sanction 
to Philip’s ambition and roused the hopes of Scotch and 
Welsh, Rome that called the clergy to independence and 
nerved the barons to resistance. ‘lo detach Innocent by 
submission from the league which hemmed him in on 
every side was the least part of John’s purpose. He re- 
solved to make Rome his ally, to turn its spiritual thun- 
ders on his foes, to use it in breaking up the confederacy 
it had formed, in crushing the baronage, in oppressing 
the clergy, in paralyzing—as Rome only could paralyze 
—the energy of the Primate. That greater issues even 
than these were involved in John’s rapid change of 


994 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


policy time was to show; but there is no need to credit 
the King with the foresight that would have discerned 
them. His quick versatile temper saw no doubt little 
save the momentary gain. But that gain was immense. | 
Nor was the price as hard to pay as it seems to modern 
eyes. The Pope stood too high above earthly monarchs, 
his claims, at least as Innocent conceived and expressed 
them, were too spiritual, too remote from the immediate 
business and interests of the day, to make the owning of 
his suzerainty any very practical burden. John could 
recall a time when his father was willing to own the same 
subjection as that which he was about to take on himself. 
He could recail the parallel allegiance which his brother 
had pledged to the Emperor. Shame indeed there must 
be in any loss of independence, but in this less than any, 
and with Rome the shame of submission had already been 
incurred. But whatever were the King’s thoughts his 
act was decisive. On the 15th of May 1213 he knelt be- 
fore the legate Pandulf, surrendered his kingdom to the 
Roman See, took it back again as a tributary vassal, swore 
fealty and did liege homage to the Pope. .“ 

In after times men believed that England thrilled at 
the news with a sense of national shame such as she had 
never felt before. “*He has become the Pope’s man” the 
whole country was said to have murmured; ‘he has for- 
feited the very name of King; from a free man he has 
degraded himself into a serf.” But this was the belief of 
a time still to come when the rapid growth of national 
feeling which this step and its issues did more than any- 
thing to foster made men look back on the scene between 
John and Pandulf as a national dishonor. We see little 
trace of such a feeling in the contemporary accounts of 
the time. All seem rather to have regarded it as a com- 
plete settlement of the difficulties in which king and 
kingdom were involved. Asa political measure its suc- 
cess was immediate and complete. The French army at 
once broke up in impotent rage, and when Philip turned 
on the enemy John had raised up for him in Flanders, 
five hundred English ships under the Earl of Salisbury 
fell upon the fleet which accompanied the French army 


. THE CHARTER, 1204—1291. py 


along the coast and utterly destroyed it. The league 
which John had so long natured at once disclosed itself. 
Otto, reinforcing his Gerfaan army by the knighthood of 
Flanders and Boulogne a3; well as by a body of mer- 
cenaries in the pay of the English King, invaded France 
from the north. John called on his baronage to follow 
him over sea for an attack on Philip from the South. 
Their plea that he remained excommunicate was set 
aside by the arrival of Langton and his formal absolution 
of the King on a renewal of his coronation oath and a 
pledge to put away all evil customs. But the barons | 
still stood aloof. They would serve at home, they said, 
but they refused to cross the sea. Those of the north 
took a more decided attitude of opposition. From this 
point indeed the northern barons begin to play their part 
in our constitutional history. Lacies, Vescies, Percies, 
Stutevilles, Bruces, houses such as those of de Ros or de 
Vaux, all had sprung to greatness on the ruins of the 
Mowbrays and the great houses of the Conquest and had 
done service to the Crown in its strife with the older 
feudatories. But loyal as was their tradition they were 
English to the core ; they had neither lands nor interest 
over sea, and they now declared themselves bound by no 
tenure to follow the King in foreign wars. Furious at this 
check to his plans John marched in arms northwards to 
bring these barons to submission. But he had now to 
reckon with a new antagonist in the Justiciar, Geoffry 
Fitz-Peter. Geoffry had hitherto bent to the King’s will ; 
but the political sagacity which he drew from the school 
of Henry the Second in which he had been trained 
showed him the need of concession, and his wealth, his 
wide kinship, and his experience of affairs gave his inter- 
positiona decisive weight. Heseized on the political op- 
portunity which was offered by the gathering of a Coun- 
cil at St. Albans at the opening of August with the pur- 
pose of assessing the damages done to the Church. Be- 
sides the bishops and barons, a reeve and his four men 
were summoned to this Council from each royal demesne, 
no doubt simply as witnesses of the sums due to the 
plundered clergy. Their presence however was of great 
15 


926 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


import. Itis the first instance which our history presents 
of the summons of such representatives to a national 
Council, and the instance tock fresh weight from the 
great matters which came to be discussed. In the King’s 
name the Justiciar promised good government for the 
time to come, and forbade all royal officers to practise ex- 
tortion as they prized life and limb. The King’s peace 
was pledged to those who had opposed him in the past ; 
and observance of the laws of Henry the First was en- 
joined upon all within the realm. 

But it was not in Geoffry Fitz-Peter that English free- 
dom was to find its champion and the baronage their 
leader. From the moment of his landing in England 
Stephen Langvon had taken up the constitutional position 
of the Primate in upholding the old customs and rights 
of the realm against the personal despotism of the kings. 
As Anselm had withstood William the Red, as Theobald 
had withstood Stephen, so Langton prepared to with- 
stand and rescue his country from the tyranny of John. 
He had already forced him to swear to observe the laws 
of Edward the Confessor, in other words the traditional 
liberties of the realm. When the baronage refused to 
sail for Poitou he compelled the King to deal with them 
not by arms but by process of law. But the work which 
he now undertook was far greater and weightier than 
this. The pledges of Henry the First had long been for- 
gotten when the Justiciar brought them to light, but 
Langton saw the vast importance of such a precedent. 
At the close of the month he produced Henry’s charter in 
a fresh gathering of barons at St. Paul’s, and it was at 
once welcomed as a base for the needed reforms. From 
London Langton hastened to the King, whom he reached 
at Northampton on his way to attack the nobles of the 
north, and wrested from him a promise to bring his strife 
with them to legal judgment before assailing them in arms. 
With his allies gathering abroad John had doubtless no 
wish to be entangled in a long quarrel at home, and the 
Archbishop’s mediation allowed him to withdraw with 
seeming dignity. After a demonstration therefore at 
Durham John marched hastily south again, and reached 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. yi d 


Lon‘on in October. His Justiciar at once laid before him 
the claims of the Councils of St. Alban’s and St. Paul’s; 
but the death of Geoffry at this juncture freed him from 
the pressure which his minister was putting upon him. 
“Now, by God’s feet,” cried John, “I am for the first 
time King and Lord of England,” and he entrusted the 
vacant justiciarship to a Poitevin, Peter des Roches, the 
Bishop of Winchester, whose temper was in harmony 
with his own. But the death of Geoffry only called the 
Archbishop to the front, and Langton at once demanded 
the King’s assent to the Charter of Henry the First. In 
seizing on this Charter as a basis for national action 
Langton showed a political ability of the highest order. 
The enthusiasm with which his recital was welcomed 
showed the sagacity with which the Archbishop had 
chosen hisground. From that moment the baronage was 
no longer drawn together in secret conspiracies by a 
sense of common wrong or a vague longing for common 
deliverance: they were openly united in a definite claim 
of national freedom and national law. 

_John could as yet only meet the claim by delay. His 
policy had still to wait for its fruits at Rome, his di- 
plomacy to reap its harvest in Flanders, ere he could deal 
with England. From the hour of his submission to the 
Papacy his one thought had been that of vengeance on 
the barons who, as he held, had betrayed him; but ven- 
geance was impossible till he should return a conqueror 
from the fields of France. It was a sense of this danger 
which nerved the baronage to their obstinate refusal to 
follow him over sea: but furious as he was at their re- 
sistance, the Archbishop’s interposition condemned John 
still to wait for the hour of his revenge. In the spring 
of 1214 he crossed with what forces he could gather to 
Poitou, rallied its nobles round him, passed the Loire in 
triumph, and won back again Angers, the home of his 
race. At the same time Otto and the Count of Flanders, 
their German and Flemish knighthood strengthened by 
reinforcements from Boulogne as well as by a body of 
English troops under the Earl of Salisbury, threatened 
France from the North. For the moment Philip seemed 


928 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


lost: and yet on the fortunes of Philip hung the fortunes 
of English freedom. But in this crisis of her fate, France 
was true to herself and her King. From every borough 
of Northern France the townsmen marched to his rescue, 
and the village priests led their flocks to battle with the 
Church-banners: flying at their head. The two armies 
met at the close of July near the bridge of Bouvines, be- 
tween Lille and Tournay, and from the first the day 
went against the allies. The Flemish knights were the 
first to fly ; then the Germans in the centre of the host 
were crushed by the overwhelming numbers of the 
French ; last of all the English on the right of it were 
broken by a fierce onset of the Bishop ot Beauvais who 
charged mace in hand and struck the Earl of Salisbury 
to the ground. The news of this complete overthrow 
reached John in the midst of his triumphs in the South, 
and scattered his hopes to the winds. He was at once 
deserted by the Poitevin nobles; and a hasty retreat 
alone enabled him to return in October, baffled and hu- 
miliated, to his island kingdom. 

His return forced on the crisis to which events had so 
so long been drifting. The victory at Bouvines gave 
strength to his opponents. The open resistance of the 
northern Barons nerved the rest of their order to action. 
The great houses who had cast away their older feudal 
traditions for a more national policy were drawn by the 
crisis into close union with the families which had sprung 
from the ministers and councillors of the two Henries. 
To the first group belonged such men as Saher de Quinci, 
the Earl of Winchester, Geoffrey of Mandeville, Earl of 
Essex, the Earl of Clare, Fulk Fitz-Warin, William Mal- 
let, the houses of Fitz-Alan and Gant. Among the second 
eroup were Henry Bohun and Roger Bigod, the Earls 
of Hereford and Norfolk, the younger William Marshal, 
and Robert de Vere. Robert Fitz-Walter, who took the 
command of their united force, represented both parties 
equally, for he was sprung from the Norman house of 
Brionne, while the Justiciar of Henry the Second, 
\ Richard de Lucy, had been his grandfather. Secretly, 

\and on the pretext of pilgrimage, these nobles met at St. 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. "999 


Edmundsbury, resolute to bear no longer with John’s 
delays. If he refused to restore their liberties they swore 
to make war on him till he confirmed them by Charter 
under the King’s seal, and they parted to raise forces 
with the purpose of presenting their demands at Christ- 
mas. John, knowing nothing of the coming storm, pur- 
sued his policy of winning over the Church by granting 
it freedom of election, while he embittered still more the 
strife with his robles by demanding scutage from the 
northern nobles who had refused to follow him to Poitou. 
But the barons were now ready to act, and early in Jan- 
uary in the memorable year 1215 they appeared in arms 
to lay, as they had planned, their demands before the 
King. 

John was taken by surprise. He asked for a truce till 
Easter-tide, and spent the interval in fevered efforts to 
avoid the blow. Again he offered freedom to the Church, 
and took vows as a Crusader against whom war was a 
sacrilege, while he called for a general oath of allegiance 
and fealty from the whole body of his subjects. But 
month after month only showed the King the useless- 
ness of further resistance. Though Pandulf was with 
him, his vassalage had as yet brought little fruit in the 
way of aid from Rome; the commissioners whom he sent 
to plead his cause at the shire-courts brought back news 
that no man would help him against the charter that the 
barons claimed: and his efforts to detach the clergy 
from the league of his opponents utterly failed. The 
nation was against the King. He was far indeed from 
being utterly deserted. His ministers still clung to him, 
men such as Geoffrey de Lucy, Geoffrey de Furnival, 
Thomas Basset, and William Briwere, statesmen trained 
in the administrative school of his father and who, dissent 
as they might from John’s mere oppression, still looked 
on the power of the Crown as the one barrier against 
feudal anarchy : and beside them stood some of the great 
nobles of royal blood, his father’s bastard Earl William 
of Salisbury, his cousin Earl William of Warenne, and 
Henry Earl of Cornwall, a grandson of Henry the First. 
With him too remained Ranulf, Earl of Chester, and the 


230 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


wisest and noblest of the barons, William Marsha: the 
elder, Earl of Pembroke. William Marshal had shared in 
the rising of the younger Henry against Henry the 
Second, and stood by him as he died; he had shared in 
the overthrow of William Longchamp and in the out- 
lawry of John. He was now an old man, firm, as we 
shall see in his after course, to recall the government to 
the path of freedom and law, but shrinking from a strife 
which might bring back the anarchy of Stephen’s day, 
and looking for reforms rather in the bringing constitu- 
tional pressure to bear upon the King than in forcing 
them from him by arms. 

But cling as such men might to John, they clung to 
him rather as mediators than adherents. Their sympa- 
thies went with the demands of the barons when the 
delay which had been granted was over and the nobles 
again gathered in arms at Brackley in Northamptonshire 
to lay their claims before the King. Nothing marks more 
strongly the absolutely despotic idea of his sovereignty 
which John had formed than the passionate surprise 
which breaks out in his reply. “ Why do they not ask 
for my kingdom?” he cried. “I will never grant such 
liberties as will make me a slave!” The imperialist 
theories of the lawyers of his father’s court had done 
their work. Held at bay by the practical sense of Henry, 
they had told on the more headstrong nature of his sons. 
Richard and John both held with Glanvill that the will 
of the prince was the law of the land; and to fetter that 
will by the customs and franchises which were embodied 
in the barons’ claims seemed to John a monstrous usurpa- 
tion of his rights. But no imperialist theories had 
touched the minds of his people. The country rose as 
one man at his refusal. At the close of May London 
threw open her gates to the forces of the barons, now 
* arrayed under Robert Fitz-Walter as “Marshal of the 


= Army of God and Holy Church.” Exeter and Lincoln 


- followed the example of the capital; promises of aid 
came from Scotland and Wales; the northern barons 
marched hastily under Eustace de Vesci to join their 
comrades in London. Even the nobles who had as yet 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 231 


clung to the King, but whose hopes of conciliation were 
blasted by his obstinacy, vielded at last to the summons 
of the “ Army of God.” Pandulf indeed and Archbishop 
Langton still remained with John, but they counselled 
as Earl Ranulf and William Marshal counselled his ac- 
ceptance of the Charter. None in fact counselled its 
rejection save his new Justiciar, the Poitevin Peter des 
Roches, and other foreigners who knew the barons pur- 
posed driving them from the land. But even the number 
of these was small; there was a moment when John 
found himself with but seven knights at his back and 
before him a nation in arms. Quick as he was, he had 
been taken utterly by surprise. It was in vain that in 
the short respite he had gained from Christmas to Easter 
he had summoned mercenaries to his aid and appealed to 
his new suzerain, the Pope. Summons and appeal were 
alike too late. Nursing wrath in his heart, John bowed 
to necessity and called the barons to a conference on an 
island in the Thames, between Windsor and Staines, 
near a marshy meadow by the river side, the meadow of 
Runnymede. The King encamped on one bank of the 
river, the barons covered the flat of Runnymede on the 
other. Their delegates met on the 15th of July in the 
island between them, but the negotiations were a mere 
cloak to cover John’s purpose of unconditional submis- 
sion. The Great Charter was discussed and agreed to in 
a single day. 

Copies of it were made and sent for preservation to the 
cathedrals and churches, and one copy may still be seen 
in the British Museum, injured by age and fire, but with 
the royal seal still hanging from the brown, shrivelled 
parchment. It is impossible to gaze without reverence 
ou the earliest monument of English freedom which we 
can see with our own eyes and touch with our own 
hands, the great Charter to which from age to age men 
have looked back as the groundwork of English liberty. 
But in itself the Charter was no novelty, nor did it claim 
to establish any new constitutional principles. The 
Charter of Henry the First formed the basis of the whole, 
and the additions to it are for the most part formal 


PAS gl HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


recognitions of the judicial and administrative changes 
introduced by Henry the Second. What was new in it 
was its origin. In form, like the Charter on which it 
was based, it was nothing but a royal grant. In actual 
fact it was a treaty between the whole English people 
and its king. In it England found itself for the first 
time since the Conquest a nation bound together by 
common national interests, by a common national sym- 
pathy. In words which almost close the Charter, the 
“ community of the old land” is recognized as the great 
body from which the restraining power of the baronage 
takes its validity. There is no distinction of blood or 
class, of Norman or not Norman, of noble or not noble. 
All are recognized as Englishmen, the rights of all are 
owned as English rights. Bishops and nobles claimed 
and secured at Runnymede the rights not of baron and 
churchman only but those of freeholder and merchant, 
of townsman and villein. ‘The provisions against wrong 
and extortion which the barons drew up as against the 
King for themselves they drew up as against themselves 
for their tenants. Based too as it professed to be on 
Henry’s Charter it was far from being a mere copy of 
what had gone before. The vague expressions of the old 
Charter were now exchanged for precise and elaborate 
provisions. The bonds of unwritten custom which the 
older grant did little more than recognize had proved too 
weak to hold the Angevins; and the baronage set them 
aside for the restraints of written and defined law. It is 
in this way that the Great Charter marks the transition 
from the age of traditional rights, preserved in the na- 
tion’s memory and officially declared by the Primate, to 
the age of written legislation, of Parliaments and Stat- 
utes, which was to come. 

Its opening indeed is in general terms, The Church 
had shown its power of self-defence in the struggle over 
the interdict, and the clause which recognized its rights 
alone retained the older and general form. But all vague- 
ness ceases when the Charter passes on to deal with the 
rights of Englishmen at large, their right to justice, to 
security of person and property, to good government. 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. V0 


‘- No freeman,” ran a memorable article that lies at the 
base of our whole judicial system “shall be seized or 
imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or in any way 
brought to ruin: we will not go against any man nor 
send against him, save by legal judgment of his peers or 
by the law of the land.” “To no man will we sell,” runs 
another, “ or deny, or delay, right or justice.’ The great 
reforms of the past reigns were now formally recognized ; 
judges of assize were to hold their circuits four times in 
the year, and the King’s Court was no longer to follow 
the King in his wanderings over the vealm but to sit in 
a fixed place. But the denial of justice under John was 
a small danger compared with the lawless exactions both 
of himself and his predecessor. Richard had increased 
the amount of the scutage which Henry the Second had 
introduced, and applied it to raise funds for his ransom. 
He had restored the Danegeld, or land-tax, so often 
abolished, under the new name of “ carucage,” had seized 
the wool of the Cistercians and the plate of the churches, 
and rated movables as well as land. John had again 
raised the rate of scutage, and imposed aids, fines, and 
ransoms at his pleasure without counsel of the baronage. 
The Great Charter met this abuse by a provision on 
which our constitutional system rests. ‘ No scutage or 
aid [other than the three customary feudal aids] shall 
be imposed in our realm save by the common council of 
the realm;” and to this Great Council it was provided 
that prelates and the greater barons should be summoned 
by special writ and all tenants in chief through the 
sheriffs and bailiffs at least forty days before. The pro- 
vision defined what had probably been the common usage 
of the realm ; but the definition turned it into a national 
right, a right so momentous that on its rests our whole 
Parliamentary life. Even the baronage seem to have 
been startled when they realized the extent of their 
claim; and the provision was dropped from the later 
issue of the Charter at the outset of the next reign. But 
the clause brought home to the nation ‘at large their 
possession of a right which became dearer as years went 
by. More and more clearly the nation discovered that 


234 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


in these simple words lay the secret of political power. 
It was the right of self-taxation that England fought for 
under Earl Simon as she fought for it under Hampden. 
It was the establishment of this right which established 
English freedom. 

The rights which the barons claimed for themselves 
they claimed for the nation at large. The boon of free 
and unbought justice was a boon for all, but a special 
provision protected the poor. The forfeiture of the free- 
man on conviction of felony was never to include his 
tenement, or that of the merchant his wares, or that of 
the countryman, as Henry the Second had long since 
ordered, his wain. The means of actual livelihood were 
to be left even to the worst. The seizure of provisions, 
the exaction of forced labor, by royal officers was for- 
bidden ; and the abuses of the forest system were checked 
by a clause which disafforested all forests made in John’s 
reign. The under-tenants were protected against all law- 
less exactions of their lords in precisely the same terms 
as these were protected against the lawless exactions of 
the Crown. The towns were secured in the enjoyment 
of their municipal privileges, their freedom from arbi- 
trary taxation, their rights of justice, of common deliber- 
ation, of regulation of trade. ‘ Let the city of London 
have all its old liberties and its free customs, as well by 
Jand as by water. Besides this, we will and grant that 
all other cities, aud boroughs, and towns, and ports, have 
all their liberties and free customs.” The influence of 
the trading class is seen in two other enactments by 
which freedom of journeying and trade was secured to 
foreign merchants and uniformity of weights and meas- 
ures was ordered to be enforced throughout the realm. 

There remained only one question, and that the most 
difficult of all; the question how to secure this order 
which the Charter established in the actual government 
of the realm. It was easy to sweep away the immediate 
abuses ; the hostages were restored to their homes, the 
foreigners banished by a clause in the Charter from the 
country. But it was less easy to provide means for the 
control of a King whom no man could trust. By the 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 235 


treaty as settled at Runnymede a council of twenty-four 
barons were to be chosen from the general body of their 
order to enforce on John the observance of the Charter 
with the right of declaring war on the King should its 
provisions be infringed, and it was provided that the 
Charter should not only be published throughout the 
whole country but sworn to at every hundred-mote and 
town-mote by order from the King. ‘ They have given 
me four-and-twenty over-kings,”’ cried John in a burst of 
fury, flinging himself on the floor and gnawing sticks and 
straw in his impotent rage. But the rage soon passed 
into the subtle policy of which he was a master. After 
a few days he left Windsor; and lingered for months 
along the southern shore, waiting for news of the aid he 
had solicited from Rome and from the Continent. It 
was not without definite purpose that he had become the 
vassal of the Papacy. While Innocent was dreaming of 
a vast Christian Empire with the Pope at its head to en- 
force justice and religion on his under-kings, John be- 
heved that the Papal protection would enable him to rule 
as tyrannically as he would. The thunders of the Papacy 
were to be ever at hand for his protection, as the armies 
of England are at hand to protect the vileness and op- 
pression of a Turkish Sultan or a Nizam of Hyderabad. 
His envoys were already at Rome, pleading for a con- 
demnation of the Charter. The after action of the Papacy 
shows that Innocent was moved by no hostility to English 
freedom. But he was indignant that a matter which 
might have been brought before his court of appeal as 
overlord should have been dealt with by armed revolt, 
and in this crisis both his imperious pride and the legal 
tendency of his mind swayed him to the side of the King 
who submitted to his justice. He annulled the Great 
Charter by a bull in August, and at the close of the year 
excommunicated the barons. 

His suspension of Stephen Langton from the exercise 
of his office as Primate was a more fatal blow. Langton 
hurried to Rome, and his absence left the barons with- 
out a head at a moment when the very success of their 
efforts was dividing them. Their forces were already 


236 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. ~ 


disorganized when autumn brought a host of foreign sol- 
diers from over sea to the King’s standard. After star- 
ving Rochester into submission John found himself strong 
enough to march ravaging through the Midland and 
Northern counties, while his mercenaries spread like 
locusts over the whole face of the land. From Berwick 
the King turned back triumphant to coop up his enemies 
in London while fresh Papal excommunications fell on 
the barons and the city. But the burghers set Innocent 
at defiance. ‘ The ordering of secular matters apper- 
taineth not to the Pope,” they said, in words that seem 
like mutterings of the coming Lollardism; and at the 
advice of Simon Langton, the Archbishop’s brother, bells 
swung out and mass was celebrated as before. Success 
however was impossible for the undisciplined militia of 
the country and the towns against the trained forces of 
the King, and despair drove the barons to listen to Fitz- 
Walter and the French party in their ranks, and to seek 
aid from over sea. Philip had long been waiting the op- 
portunity for his revenge upon John. In the April of 
1216 his son Louis accepted the crown in spite of In- 
nocent’s excommunications, and landed soon after in 
Kent with a considerable force. As the barons had fore- 
seen, the French mercenaries who constituted John’s 
host refused to fight against the French sovereign and 
the whole aspect of affairs was suddenly reversed. De- 
serted by the bulk of his troops, the King was forced to 
fall rapidly back on the Welsh Marches, while his rival 
entered London and received the submission of the larger 
part of England. Only Dover held out obstinately 
against Louis. By a series of rapid marches John suc- 
ceeded in distracting the plans of the barons and in re- 
lieving Lincoln; then after a short stay at Lynn he 
crossed the Wash in a fresh movement to the north. In 
crossing however his army was surprised by the tide, and 
his baggage with the royal treasures washed away. 
Fever seized the baffled tyrant as he reached the Abbey 
of Swineshead, his sickness was inflamed by a gluttonous 
debauch, and on the 19th of October John breathed his 
last at Newark. 


CHAPTER II. 
HENRY THE THIRD. 
1216—1282. 


THE death of John changed the whole face of English 
affairs. His son, Henry of Winchester, was but nine 
years old, and the pity which was stirred by the child’s 
helplessness was aided by a sense of injustice in burden- 
ing him with the iniquity of his father. At his death 
John had driven from his side even the most loyal of his 
barons ; but William Marshal had clung to him to the 
last, and with him was Gualo, the Legate of Innocent’s 
successor, Honorius the Third. The position of Gualo 
as representative of the Papal over-lord of the realm was 
of the highest importance, and his action showed the 
real attitude of Rome towards English freedom. The 
boy-king was hardly crowned at Gloucester when Legate 
and Earl issued in his name the very Charter against 
which his father had died fighting. Only the clauses 
which regulated taxation and the summoning of par- 
liament were as yet declared to be suspended. ‘The 
choice of William Marshal as “governor of King and 
kingdom” gave way to this step; and its effect was seen 
when the contest was renewed in 1217. Louis was at 
first successful in the eastern counties, but the political 
reaction was aided by jealousies which broke out between 
the English and French nobles in his force, and the first 
drew gradually away from him. So general was the 
defection that at the opening of summer William Marshal 
felt himself strong enough for a blow at his foes. Louis 
himself was investing Dover and a joint army of French 
and English barons under the Count of Perche and 


Robert Fitz-Walter was besieging Lincoln when gather- 
(237) 


238 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


ing troops rapidly from the royal castles the regent 
marched to the relief of the latter town. Cooped up in 
- its narrow streets and attacked at once by the Earl and 
the garrison, the barons fled in utter rout; the Count of 
Perche fell on the field, Robert Fitz-Walter was taken 
prisoner. Louis at once retreated on London and called 
for aid from France. But a more terrible defeat crushed 
his remaining hopes. <A small English fleet which set 
sail from Dover under Hubert de Burgh fell boldly on 
the reinforcements which were crossing under escort of 
Eustace the Monk, a well-known freebooter of the Chan- 
nel. Some incidents of the fight light up for us the 
naval warfare of the time. From the decks of the 
English vessels bowmen poured their arrows into the 
crowded transports, others hurled quicklime into their 
enemies faces, while the more active vessels crashed 
with their armed prows into the sides of the French 
ships. The skill of the mariners of the Cinque Ports 
turned the day against the larger forces of their op- 
ponents, and the fleet of Eustace was utterly destroyed. 
The royal army at once closed upon London, but 
resistance was really at an end. By a treaty concluded 
at Lambeth in September Louis promised to withdraw 
from England on payment of a sum which he claimed as 
debt; his adherents were restored to their possessions, 
the liberties of London and other towns confirmed, and 
the prisoners on either side set at liberty. A fresh issue 
of the Charter, though in its modified form, proclaimed 
yet more clearly the temper and policy of the EHarl 
Marshal. 

His death at the opening of 1219, after a year spent in 
giving order to the realm, brought no change in the 
system he had adopted. The control of affairs passed 
into the hands of a new legate, Pandulf, of Stephen 
Langton who had just returned forgiven from Rome, and 
of the Justiciar, Hubert de Burgh. It was a time of 
transition, and the temper of the Justiciar was eminently 
transitional. Bred in the school of Henry the Second, 
Hubert had little sympathy with national freedom, and 
though resolute to maintain the Charter he can have had 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 239 


small love for it; his conception of good government, 
like that of his master, lay in a wise personal adminis- 
tration, in the preservation of order and law. But he 
combined with this a thoroughly English desire for 
national independence, a hatred of foreigners, and a 
reluctance to waste English blood and treasure in Con- 
tinental struggles. Able as he proved himself, his task 
was one of no common difficulty. He was hampered by 
the constant interference of Rome. A Papal legate 
resided at the English court, and claimed a share in the 
administration of the realm as the representative of its — 
over-lord and as guardian of the young sovereign. A 
foreign party too had still a footing in the kingdom, for 
William Marshal had been unable to rid himself of men 
like Peter des Roches or Faukes de Breauté, who had 
fought on the royal side in the struggle against Louis. 
Hubert had to deal too with the anarchy which that 
struggle left behind it. From the time of the Conquest 
the centre of England had been covered with the domains 
of great houses, whose longings were for feudal in- 
dependence and whose spirit of revolt had been held in 
check partly by the stern rule of the Kings and partly 
by the rise of a baronage sprung from the Court and 
settled for the most part in the North. The oppression 
of John united both the earlier and these newer houses 
in the struggle for the Charter. But the character of 
each remained unchanged, and the close of the struggle 
saw the feudal party break out in their old lawlessness 
and defiance of the Crown. 

For a time the anarchy of Stephen’s days seemed to 
revive. But the Justiciar was resolute to crush it, and 
he was backed by the strenuous efforts of Stephen 
Langton. A new and solemn coronation of the young 
King in 1220 was followed by a demand for the res- 
toration of the royal castles which had been seized by 
the barons and foreigners. The Earl of Chester, the 
head of the feudal baronage, though he rose in armed 
rebellion, quailed before the march of Hubert and the 
Primate’s threats of excommunication. A more for- 
midable foe remained in the Frenchman, Faukes de 


240 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Breauté, the sheriff of six counties, with six royal castles 
in his hands, and allied both with the rebel barons and 
Liewelyn of Wales. But in 1224 his castle of Bedford 
was besieged for two months; and on its surrender the 
stern justice of Hubert hung the twenty-four knights 
and their retainers who formed the garrison before its 
walls. The blow was effectual; the royal castles were 
surrendered by the barons and the land was once more 
at peace. Freed from foreign soldiery, the country was 
freed also-from the presence of the foreign legate. Lang- 
ton wrested a promise from Rome that so long as he 
lived no future legate should be sent to England, and 
with Pandulf’s resignation in 1221 the direct interference 
of the Papacy in the government of the realm came to 
an end. But even these services of the Primate were 
small compared with his services to English freedom. 
Throughout his life the Charter was the first object of 
his care. The omission of the articles which restricted — 
the royal power over taxation in the Charter which was 
published at Henry’s accession in 1216 was doubtless 
due to the Archbishop’s absence and disgrace at Rome. 
The suppression of disorder seems to have revived the 
older spirit of resistance among the royal ministers ; for 
when Langton demanded a fresh confirmation of the 
Charter in Parliament at London William Brewer, one 
of the King’s councillors, protested that it had been ex- 
torted by force and was without legal validity. ‘If you 
loved the King, William,” the Primate burst out in 
anger, “ you would not throw a stumbling-block in the 
way of the peace of the realm.” The young King was 
cowed by the Archbishop’s wrath, and promised obsery- 
ance of the Charter. But it may have been their con- 
sciousness of such a temper among the royal councillors 
that made Langton and the baronage demand two years 
later a fresh promulgation of the Charter as the price of 
a subsidy, and Henry’s assent established the principl , 
so fruitful of constitutional results, that redress of wrongs 
precedes a grant to the Crown. 

These repeated sanctions of the Charter and the gov- 
ernment of:the realm year after year in accordance with 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 241 


its provisions were gradually bringing the new freedom 
home to the mass of Englishmen. But the sense of 
liberty was at this time quickened and intensified by a 
religious movement which stirred English society to its 
depths. Never had the priesthood wielded such bound- 
less power over Christendom as in the days of Innocent 
the Third and his immediate successors. But its religious 
hold on the people was loosening day by day. The old 
reverence for the Papacy was fading away before the uni- 
versal resentment at its political ambition, its lavish use 
of interdict and excommunication for purely secular ends, | 
its degradation of the most sacred sentences into means 
of financial extortion. In Italy the struggle that was 
opening between Rome and Frederick the Second dis- 
closed a spirit of skepticism which among the Epicurean 
poets of Florence denied the immortality of the soul and 
attacked the very foundations of the faith itself. In 
Southern Gaul, Languedoc and Provence had embraced 
the heresy of the Albigenses and thrown off allallegiance 
to the Papacy. Even in England, though there were no 
signs as yet of religious revolt, and though the political 
action of Rome had been in the main on the side of free- 
dom, there was a spirit of resistance to its interference 
with national concerns which broke out in the struggle 
against John. ‘ ‘The Pope has no part in secular matters,” 
had been the reply of London to the interdict of Honorius. 
And within the English Church itself there was. much 
to call for reform. Its attitude in the strife for the Char- 
ter as well as the after work of the Primate had made it 
more popular than ever; but its spiritual energy was less 
than its political. The disuse of preaching, the decline 
of the monastic orders into rich landowners, the non- 
residence and ignorance of the parish-priests, lowered 
the religious influence of the clergy. The abuses of the 
time foiled even the energy of such men as Bishop Gros- 
seteste of Lincoln. His constitutions forbid the clergy 
to haunt taverns, to gamble, to share in drinking bouts, 
to mixin the riot and debauchery of the life of the baron- 
age. But such prohibitions witness to the prevalence 
of the evils they denounce. Bishops and deans were 
16 


to 


2419 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


still withdrawn from their ecclesiastical duties to act as 
ministers, judges, or ambassadors. Benefices were heaped 
in hundreds at a time on royal favorites like John Man- 
sel. Abbeys absorbed the tithes of parishes and then 
served them by half-starved vicars, while exemptions pur- 
chased from Rome shielded the scandalous lives of canons 
and monks from all episcopal discipline. And behind all 
this was a group of secular statesmen and scholars, the 
successors of such critics as Walter Map, waging indeed 
no open warfare with the Church, but noting with bitter 
sarcasm its abuses and its faults. 

To bring the world back again within the pale of the 
Church was the aim of two religious orders which sprang 
suddenly to life at the opening of the thirteenth century. 
The zeal of the Spaniard Dominic was roused at the sight 
of the lordly prelates who sought by fire and sword to 
win the Albigensian heretics to the faith. ‘ Zeal,” he 
cried, “must be met by zeal, lowliness by lowliness, false 
sanctity by real sanctity, preaching lies by preaching 
truth.” His fiery ardor and rigid orthodoxy were sec- 
onded by the mystical piety, the imaginative enthusiasm 
of Francis of Assisi. The life of Francis falls like a 
‘stream of tender light across the darkness of the time. 
In the frescoes of Giotto or the verse of Dante we see 
him take Poverty for his bride. He strips himself of all, 
he flings his very clothes at his father’s feet, that he may 
be one with Nature and God. His passionate verse 
claims the moon for his sister and the sun for his brother. 
He calls on his brother the Wind, and his sister the Water. 
His last faint cry was a “ Welcome, Sister Death!” 
Strangely as the two men differed from each other, their 
aim was the same—to convert the heathen, to extirpate 
heresy, to reconcile knowledge with orthodoxy, above 
all to carry the gospel to the poor. The work was to be 
done by an utter reversal of the older monasticism, by 
seeking personal salvation in effort for the salvation of 
their fellow-men, by exchanging the solitary of the 
cloister for the preacher, the monk for the ‘“ brother” or 
friar. To force the new “brethren” into entire depen- 
dence on those among whom they labored their vow of 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 248 


Poverty was turned into a stern reality; the “ Begging 
Friars’”’ were to subsist solely on alms, they might pos- 
sess neither money nor lands, the very houses in which 
they lived were to be held in trust for them by others. 
The tide of populay enthusiasm which welcomed their 
appearance swept before it the reluctance of Rome, the 
jealousy of the older orders, the opposition of the paro- 
chial priesthood. Thousands of brethren gathered in a 
few years round Francis and Dominic; and the begging 
preachers, clad in coarse frock of serge witha girdle of 
rope round their waist, wandered barefooted as mission- 
aries over Asia, battled with heresy in Italy and Gaul, lec- 
tured in the Universities, and preached and toiled among 
the poor. 

To the towns especially the coming of the Friars was 
a religious revolution. They had been left for the most 
part to the worst and most ignorant of the clergy, the mass- 
priest, whose sole subsistence lay in his fees. Burgher 
and artisan were left to spell out what religious instruc- 
tion they might from the gorgeous ceremonies of the 
Church’s ritual or the scriptural pictures and sculptures 
which were graven on the walls of its minsters. Wecan 
hardly wonder at the burst of enthusiasm which wel- 
comed the itinerant preacher whose fervid appeal, coarse 
wit, and familiar story brought religion into the fair and 
the market place. In England, where the Black Friars 
of Dominic arrived in 1221, the Grey Friars of Francis 
in 1224, both were received with the same delight. As 
the older orders had chosen the country, the Friars chose 
the town. They had hardly landed at Dover before they 
made straight for London and Oxford. In their igno- 
rance of the road the first two Grey Brothers lost their 
way in the woods between Oxford and Baldon, and fear- 
ful of night and of the floods turned aside to a grange of 
the monks of Abingdon. Their ragged clothes and 
foreign gestures, as they prayed for hospitality, led the 
porter to take them for jongleurs, the jesters and jugglers 
of the day, and the news of this break in the monotony of 
their lives brought prior, sacrist, and cellarer tothe door 
to welcome them and witness their tricks. The disap- 


944 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


point ent was too much for the temper of the monks, and 
the brothers were kicked roughly from the gate to find 
their night’s lodging under a tree. But the welcome of 
the townsmen made up everywhere for the ill-will and 
opposition of both clergy and monks, The work of the 
Friars was physical as well as moral. The rapid progress 
of population within the boroughs had outstripped the 
sanitary regulations of the Middle Ages, and fever or 
plague or the more terrible scourge of leprosy festered in 
the wretched hovels of the suburbs. It was to haunts 
such as these that Francis had pointed his disciples, and 
the Grey Brethren at once fixed themselves in the 
meanest and poorest quarters of each town. ‘Their first 
work lay in the noisome lazar-houses ; it was amongst 
the lepers that they commonly chose the site of their 
homes. At London they settled in the shambles of New- 
gate; at Oxford they made their way to the swampy 
ground between its walls and the streams of Thames. 
Huts of mud and timber, as mean as the huts around 
them, rose within the rough fence and ditch that bounded 
the Friary. The order of Francis made a hard fight against 
the taste for sumptuous buildings and. for greater 
personal comfort which characterized the time. “I did 
not enter into religion to build walls,”’ protested an Eng- 
lish provincial when the brethren pressed for a larger 
house; and Albert of Pisa ordered a stone cloister which 
the burgesses of Southampton had built for them to be 
razed to the ground. “ You need no little mountains 
to lift your heads to heaven,” was his scornful reply to a 
claim for pillows. None but the sick went shod. An 
Oxford Friar found a pair of shoes one morning, and wore 
them at matins. At night he dreamed that robbers leapt 
on him in a dangerous pass between Gloucester and Ox- 
ford with shouts of * Kill, kill!’ “I am a friar,” shrieked 
the terror-stricken brother. - ‘* You lie,’ was the instant 
answer, “for you go shod.” The Friar lifted up his foot 
in disproof, but the shoe was there. In an agony of re- 
pentance he woke and flung the pair out of window. 

It was with less success that the order struggled against 
the passion of the time for knowledge. Their vow of 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 245 


poverty, rigidly interpreted as it was by their founders, 
would have denied them the possession of books or ma- 
terials for study. “Iam your breviary, I am your bre- 
viary,’ Francis cried passionately to a novice who asked 
for a psalter. When the news of a great doctor’s recep- 
tion was brought to him at Paris, his countenance fell. 
“Tl am afraid, my son,” he replied, “ that such doctors 
will De the destruction of my vineyard. ‘They are the 
true doctors who with the meekness of wisdom show 
forth good works for the edification of their neighbors.” 
One kind of knowledge indeed their work almost forced 
on them. The popularity of their preaching soon led 
them to the deeper study of theology; within a short 
time after their establishment in England we find as many 
as thirty readers or lecturers appointed at Hereford, Lei- 
cester, Bristol, and other places, and a regular succession 
of teachers provided at each University. The Oxford 
Dominicans lectured on theology in the nave of their 
new church while philosophy was taught in the cloister. 
The first provincial of the Grey Friars built a school in 
their Oxford house and persuaded Grosseteste to lecture 
there. His influence after his promotion to the see of 
Lincoln was steadily exerted to secure theological study 
among the Friars, as well as their establishment in the 
University ; and in this work he was ably seconded by 
his scholar, Adam Marsh, or de Marisco, under whom 
the Franciscan school at Oxford attained a reputation 
throughout Christendom. Lyons, Paris, and K6ln bor- 
rowed from it their professors: it was through its influ- 
ence indeed that Oxford rose to a position hardly inferior 
to that of Paris itself as a centre of scholasticism. But 
the result of this powerful impulse was soon seen to be 
fatal to the wider intellectual activity which had till now 
characterized the Universities. Theology in its scholas- 
tic form resumed its supremacy in the schools. -Its only 
efficient rivals were practical studies such as medicine 
and law. The last, as he was by far the greatest, in- 
stance of the freer and wider culture which had been the 
glory of the last century, was Roger Bacon, and no name 
better illustrates the rapidity and completeness with 
which it passed away. 


246 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Roger Bacon was the child of royalist parents who 
were driven into exile and reduced to poverty by the 
civil wars. From Oxford, where he studied under Ed- 
mund of Abingdon to whom he owed his introduction to 
the works of Aristotle, he passed to the University of 
Paris, and spent his whole heritage there in costly stud- 
ies and experiments. ‘From my youth up,” he writes, 
‘*T have labored at the sciences and tongues. I have 
sought the friendship of all men among the Latins who 
had any reputation for knowledge. I have caused youths 
to be instructed in languages, geometry, arithmetic, the 
construction of tables and instruments, and many nced- 
ful things besides.” The difficulties in the way of such 
studies as he had resolved to pursue were immense. He 
was without instruments or means of experiment. 
“ Without mathematical instruments no science can be 
mastered,” he complains afterwards, “and these instru- 
ments are not to be found among the Latins, nor could 
they be made for two or three hundred pounds. Besides, 
better tables are indispensably necessary, tables on which 
the motions of the heavens are certified from the begin- 
ning to the end of the world without daily labor, but 
these tables are worth a king’s ransom and could not be 
made without a vast expense. I have often attempted 
the composition of such tables, but could not finish them 
through failure of means and the folly of those whom I 
had to employ.” Books were difficult and sometimes 
even impossible to procure. ‘ The scientific works of 
Aristotle, of Avicenna, of Seneca, of Cicero, and other 
ancients cannot be had without great cost; their princi- 
pal works have not been translated into Latin, and copies 
of others are not to be found in ordinary libraries or else- 
where. The admirable books of Cicero de Republica are 
not to be found anywhere, so far as I can hear, though I 
have made anxious inquiry for them in different parts of 
the world, and by various messengers. I could never 
find the works of Seneca, though I made diligent search 
for them during twenty years and more. And so it is 
with many more most useful books connected with the 
science of morals.” Itis only words like these of his 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 247 


own that bring home to us the keen thirst for knowl- 
edge, the patience, the energy of Roger Bacon. He re- 
turned as a teacher to Oxford, and a touching record of 
his devotion to those whom he taught remains in the 
story of John of London, a boy of fifteen, whose ability 
raised him above the general level of his pupils. ‘“* When 
le came to me as a poor boy,” says Bacon in recommend- 
ing him to the Pope, “I caused him to be nurtured and 
instructed for the love of God, especially since for apti- 
tude and innocence I have never found so towardly a 
youth. Five or six years ago I caused him to be taught 
in languages, mathematics, and optics, and I have gratu- 
itously instructed him with my own lips since the time 
that I received your mandate. There is no one at Paris 
who knows so much of the root of philosophy, though he 
has not produced the branches, flowers, and fruit because 
of his youth, and because he has had no experience in 
teaching. But he has the means of surpassing all the 
Latins if he live to grow old and goes on as he has 
begun.” 

The pride with which he refers to his system of in- 
struction was justified by the wide extension which he 
gave to scientific teaching in Oxford. It is probably of 
himself that he speaks when he tells us that “ the science 
of optics has not hitherto been lectured on at Paris or 
elsewhere among the Latins, save twice at Oxford.” It 
Was a science on which he had labored for ten years. 
But his teaching seems to have fallen on a barren soil. 
Fyrom the moment when the Friars settled in the Univer- 
sities scholasticism absorbed the whole mental energy 
of the student world. The temper of the age was 
against scientific or philosophical studies. The older 
enthusiasm for knowledge was dying down; the study 
of law was the one source of promotion, whether in 
Church or state; philosophy was discredited, literature 
in its purer forins became almost extinct. After forty 
years of incessant study, Bacon found himself in his own 
words “ unheard, forgotten, buried.” He seems at one 
time to have been wealthy, but his wealth .was gone. 
“ During the twenty years that I have specially labored 


O48 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


in the attainment of wisdom, abandoning the path of 
common men, I have spent on these pursuits more. than 
two thousand pounds, not to mention the cost of books, 
experiments, instruments, tables, the acquisition of lan- 
guages, and the like. Add to all this the sacrifices I 
have made to procure the friendship of the wise and to 
obtain well-instructed assistants.” Ruined and_ baffled 
in his hopes, Bacon listened to the counsels of his friend 
Grosseteste and renounced the world. He became a friar 
of the order of St. Francis, an order where books and 
study were looked upon as hindrances to the work 
which it had specially undertaken, that of preaching 
among the masses of the poor. He had written little. 
So far was he from attempting to write that his new su- 
periors prohibited him from publishing anything under 
pain of forfeiture of the book and penance of bread and 
water. But we can see the craving of his mind, the 
passionate instinct of creation which marks the man of 
genius, in the joy with which he seized a strange oppor- 
tunity that suddenly opened before him. ‘Some few 
chapters on different subjects, written at the entreaty of 
friends,” seem to have got abroad, and were brought by 
one of the Pope’s chaplains under the notice of Clement 
the Fourth. The Pope at once invited Bacon to write. 
But difficulties stood in his way. Materials, transerip- 
tion, and other expenses for such a work as he projected 
would cost at least £60, and the Pope sent not a penny. 
Bacon begged help from his family, but they were ruined 
like himself. No one would lend to a mendicant friar, 
and when his friends raised the money he needed it was 
by pawning their goods in the hope of repayment from 
Clement. Nor was this all; the work itself, abstruse 
and scientific as was its subject, had to be treated in a 
clear and popular form to gain the Papal ear. But diff- 
culties which would have crushed another man only roused 
Roger Bacon to an almost superhuman energy. By the 
close of 1267 the work was done. The “ greater work,” 
itself in modern form a closely printed folio, with its 
successive summaries and appendices in the “lesser” 
and the * third” works (which make a good octavo more) 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 249 


were produced and forwarded to the Pope within fifteen 
months. 

No trace of this fiery haste remains in the book itself. 
The “ Opus Majus”’ is alike wonderful in plan and detail. 
Bacon’s main purpose, in the words of Dr. Whewell, is 
“to urge the necessity of a reform in the mode of philoso- 
phizing, to set forth the reasons why knowledge had not 
made a greater progress, to draw back attention to sources 
of knowledge which had been unwisely neglected, to dis- 
cover other sources which -were yet wholly unknown, 
and to animate men to the undertaking by a prospect of 
the vast advantages which it offered.” The development 
of his scheme is on the largest scale; he gathers to- 
gether the whole knowledge of his time on evcry branch 
of science which it possessed, and as he passes them in 
review he suggests improvements in nearly all. His 
labors, both here and in his after works, in the field of 
grammar and philology, his perseverance in insisting on 
the necessity of correct texts, of an accurate knowledge of 
languages, of an exact interpretation, are hardly less re- 
markable than his scientific investigations. From gram- 
mar he passes to mathematics, from mathematics to experi- 
mental philosophy. Under the name of mathematics in- 
deed was included all the physical science of the time. 
“The neglect of it for nearly thirty or forty years,” 
pleads Bacon passionately, “hath nearly destroyed 
the entire studies of Latin Christendom. For he 
who knows not mathematics cannot know any other 
sciences; and what is more, he cannot discover his 
own ignorance or find its proper remedies.” Geogra- 
phy, chronology, arithmetic, music, are brought into 
something of scientific form, and like rapid sketches 
are given of the question of climate, hydrography, 
geography, and astrology. The subject of optics, his 
own especial study, is treated with greater fulness ; 
he enters into the question of the anatomy of the eye 
besides discussing problems which lie more strictly 
within the province of optical science. In a word, the 
“ Greater Work,” to borrow the phrase of Dr. Whewell, 
is “at once the Encyclopedia and the Novum Organum 


250 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


of the thirteenth century.” The whole of the afterworks 
of Roger Bacon—and treatise after treatise has of late 
been disentombed from our libraries—are but develop- 
ments in detail of the magnificent conception he laid be- 
fore Clement. Such a work was its own great reward. 
From the world around Roger Bacon could look for and 
found small recognition. No word of acknowledgement 
seems to have reached its author from the Pope. If we 
may credit a more recent story, his writings only gained 
him a prison from his order. ‘ Unheard, forgotten, 
buried,” the old man died as he had lived, and it has 
been reserved for later ages to roll away the obscurity 
that had gathered round his memory, and to place first 
in the great roll of modern science the name of Roger 
Bacon. 

The failure of Bacon shows the overpowering strength 
of the drift towards the practical studies, and above all 
towards theology in its scholastic guise. Aristotle, who 
had been so long held at bay as the most dangerous foe 
of medieval faith, was now turned by the adoption of 
his logical method in the discussion and definition of 
theological dogma into its unexpected ally. It was this 
very method that led to “ that unprofitable subtlety and 
curiosity” which Lord Bacon notes as the vice of the 
scholastic philosophy. But ‘ certain it is ’—to continue 
the same great thinker’s comment on the Friars—* that 
if these schoolmen to their great thirst of truth and un- 
wearied travel of wit had joined variety of reading and 
contemplation, they had proved excellent lights to the 
great advancement of all learning and knowledge.” 
What, amidst all their errors, they undoubtedly did was 
to insist on the necessity of rigid demonstration and a 
more exact use of words, to introduce a clear and meth- 
odical treatment of all subjects into discussion, and 
above all to substitute an appeal to reason for unques- 
tioning obedience to authority. It was by this critical 
tendency, by the new clearness and precision which 
scholasticism gave to inquiry, that in spite of the trivial 
questions with which it often concerned itself it trained 
the human mind through the next two centuries to a 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 251 


temper which fitted it to profit by the great disclosure 
oi knowledge that brought about the Renascence. And 
it is to the same spirit of fearless inquiry as well as to 
the strong popular sympathies which their very constitu- 
tion necessitated that we must attribute the influence 
which the Friars undoubtedly exerted in- the coming 
struggle between the people and the Crown. ‘Their pos- 
ition is clearly and strongly marked throughout the 
whole contest. The University of Oxford, which soon 
fell under the direction of their teaching, stood first in_ 
its resistance to Papal exactions and its claim of English 
liberty. The classes in the towns, on whom the influ- 
ence of the Friars told most directly, were steady sup- 
porters of freedom throughout the Barons’ Wars. 
Politically indeed the teaching of the schoolmen was 
of immense value, for it sat on a religious basis and gave 
an intellectual form to the constitutional theory of the 
relations between King and people which was slowly 
emerging from the struggle with the Crown. In assum- 
ing the responsibility of a Christian king to God for the 
good government of his realm, in surrounding the pledges 
whether of ruler or ruled with religious sanctions, the 
medizval Church entered its protest against any personal 
despotism. The schoolmen pushed further still to the 
doctrine of a contract between king and people; and 
their trenchant logic made short work of the royal claims 
to irresponsible power and unquestioning obedience. 
‘‘ He who would bein truth a king,” ran a poem which 
embodies their teaching at this time in pungent verse— 
“he is a ‘ free king’ indeed if he rightly rule himself and 
hisrealm. All things are lawful to him for the govern- 
ment of his realm, but nothing is lawful to him for its 
destruction. It is one thing to rule according toa king’s 
duty, another to destroy a kingdom by resisting the law.” 
‘“‘ Let the community of the realm advise, and let it be 
known what the generality, to whom their laws are best 
known, think on the matter. They who are ruled by the 
laws know those laws best; they who make daily trial of 
them are best acquainted with them ; and since it is their 
own affairs which are at stake they will take the more 


252 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


care and will act with an eye to their own peace.” “It 
concerns the community to see what sort of men ought 
justly to be chosen for the weal of the realm.” The 
constitutional restrictions on the royal authority, the right 
of the whole nation to deliberate and decide on its own 
affairs and to have a voice in the selection of the adminis- 
trators of government, had never been so clearly stated 
before. But the importance of the Friar’s work lay in this, 
that the work of the scholar was supplemented by that of 
the popular preacher. The theory of government wrought 
outin cell and lecture-room was carried over the length 
and breadth of the land by the mendicant brother, beg- 
ging his way from town to town, chatting with farmer or 
housewife at the cottage door, and setting up his port-. 
able pulpit in village green or market-place. His open- 
air sermons, ranging from impassioned devotion to coarse 
story and homely mother wit, became the journals as 
well as the homilies of the day; political and social 
questions found place in them side by side with spiritual 
matters; and the rudest countryman learned his tale of 
a king’s oppression or a patriot’s hopes as he listened to 
the rambling passionate, humorous discourse of the 
begging friar. 

Never had there been more need of such a political 
education of the whole people than at the moment we 
have reached. For the triumph of the Charter, the con- 
stitutional government of Governor and Justiciar, had 
rested mainly on the helplessness of the King. As boy 
or youth, Henry the Third had bowed to the control of 
William Marshal or Langton or Hubert de Burgh. . But 
he was now grown to manhood, and his character was 
from this hour to tell on the events of his reign. From 
the cruelty, the lust, the impiety of his father the young 
King was absolutely free.. There was a geniality, a 
vivacity, a refinement in his temper which won a personal 
affection for him even in his worst days from some 
who bitterly censured his rule. The Abbey-church 
of Westminster, with which he replaced the rude minster 
of the Confessor, remains a monument of his artistic 
taste. He was a patron and friend of men of letters, and 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 256 


himself skilled in the “ gay science” of the troubadour. 
But of the political capacity which was the characteristic 
of his house he had little or none. Profuse, changeable, 
false from sheer meanness of spirit, impulsive alike in 
good and ill, unbridled in temper and tongue, reckless in 

insult and wit, Henry’s delight was in the display of an 
empty and prodigal magnificence, his one notion of 
government was a dream of arbitrary power. But frivolous 
as the king’s mood was, he clung with a weak man’s 
obstinacy to a distinct line of policy; and this was the 
policy not of Hubert or Langton but of John. He 
cherished the hope of recovering his heritage across the 
sea. He believed in the absolute power of the Crown; 
and looked on the pledges of the Great Charter as 
promises which force had wrested from the King and 
which force could wrest back again. France was tell- 
ing more and more on English opinion; and the claim 
which the French kings were advancing to a divine and 
absolute power gave a sanction in Henry’s mind to the 
claim of absolute authority which was still maintained 
by his favorite advisers in the royal council. Above all 
he clung to the alliance with the Papacy. Henry was 
personally devout; and his devotion only bound him the 
more firmly to his father’s system of friendship with 
Rome Gratitude and self-interest alike bound him to 
the Papal See. Rome had saved him from ruin as a 
child ; its legate had set the crown on his head; its 
threats and excommunications had foiled Louis and built 
up again a royal party. Above all it was Rome which 
could alone free him from his oath to the Charter, and 
which could alone defend him if like his father he had 
to front the baronage in arms. 

His temper was now to influence the whole system of 
government. In 1227 Henry declared himself of age; 
and though Hubert still remained Justiciar every vear 
saw him more powerless in his struggle with the ten- 
dencies of the King. The death of Stephen Langton in 
1228 was yet a heavier blow to English freedom. In 
persuading Rome to withdraw her Legate the Primate 
had averted a conflict between the national desire for 


254 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


self-covernment and the Papal claims of overlordship. 
But his death gave the signal for a more serious struggle, 
for it was in the oppression of the Church of England by 
the Popes through the reign of Henry that the little ritt 
first opened which was destined to widen into the gulf 
that parted the one from the other at the Reformation. 
In the medieval theory of the Papacy, as Innocent and 
his successors held it, Christendom, as a spiritual realm 
of which the Popes were the head, took the feudal form 
of the secular realms which lay within its pale. The 
Pope was its sovereign, the Bishops were his barons, and 
the clergy were his under vassals. As the King de- 
manded aids and subsidies in case of need from his liege- 
men, so in the theory of Rome might the head of the 
Church demand aid in need from the priesthood. And 
at this moment the need of the Popes was sore. Rome 
had plunged into her desperate conflict with the Em- 
peror, Frederick the Second, and was looking everywhere 
for the means of recruiting her drained exchequer. On 
England she believed herself to have more than a spirit- 
ual claim for support. She regarded the kingdom as a 
vassal kingdom, and as bound to aid its overlord. It was 
only by the promise of a heavy subsidy that Henry in 
{229 could buy the Papal confirmation of Langton’s suc- 
cessor. But the baronage was of other mind than Henry 
as to this claim of overlordship, and the demand of an 
aid to Rome from the laity was at once rejected by them. 
Her spiritual claim over the allegiance of the clergy 
however remained to fall back upon, and the clergy 
were in the Pope’s hand. Gregory the Ninth had already 
claimed for the Papal see a right of nomination to some 
prebends in each cathedral church; he now demanded a 
tithe of all the movables of the priesthood, and a threat 
of excommunication silenced their murmurs. Exaction 
followed exaction as the needs of the Papal treasury 
grew greater. The very rights of lay patrons were set 
aside, and under the name of ‘‘ reserves ” presentations 
to English benefices were sold in the Papal market, 
while Italian clergy were quartered on the best livings 
of the Church. 


cyt 


THE CHARTER. 1201—1291. 25 


The general indignation at last found vent in a wide 
conspiracy. In 1281 letters from “the whole body of 
those who prefer to die rather than be ruined by the Ro- 
mans” were scattered over the kingdom by armed men ; 
tithes gathered for the Pope or the foreign priests were 
seized and given to the poor; the Papal collectors were 
beaten and their bulls trodden under foot. The remon- 
strances of Rome only made clearer the national char- 
acter of the movement; but as inquiry went on the hand 
of the Justiciar himself was seen to have been at work. » 
Sheriffs had stood idly by while violence was done; royal 
letters had been shown by the rioters as approving their 
acts; and the Pope openly laid the charge of the out- 
break on the secret connivance of Hubert de Burgh. 
No charge could have been more fatal to Hubert in the 
mind of the King. But he was already in full collision 
with the Justiciar on other grounds. Henry was eager 
to vindicate his right to the great heritage his father had 
lost: the Gascons, who still clung to him, not because 
they loved England but because they hated France, 
spurred him to war; andin 1229 a secret invitation came 
from the Norman barons. But while Hubert held power 
no serious effort was made to carry on a foreign strife. 
The Norman call was rejected through his influence, and 
when a great armament gathered at Portsmouth for a 
campaign in Poitou it dispersed for want of transport and 
supplies. The young King drew his sword and rushed 
madly on the Justiciar, charging him with treason and 
corruption by the gold of France. But the quarrel was 
appeased and the expedition deferred for the year. In 
1230 Henry actually took the field in Britanny and Poi- 
tou, but the failure of thecampaign was again laid at the 
door of Hubert whose opposition was said to have pre- 
vented a decisive engagement. It was at this moment 
that the Papal accusation filled up the measure of Henry’s 
wrath against his minister. In the summer of 1232 he 
was deprived of his office of Justiciar, and dragged from 
a chapel at Brentwood where threats of death had driven 
him to take sanctuary. A smith who was ordered to 
shackle him stoutly refused. ‘I will die any death,” he 


256 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


said, “before I put iron on the man who freed England 
from the stranger and saved Dover from France.” The 
remonstrances of the Bishop of London forced the King 
to replace Hubert in sanctuary, but hunger compelled 
him to surrender; he was thrown a prisoner into the 
Tower, and though soon released he remained powerless 
in the realm. His fall left England without a check to 
the rule of Henry himself. 


CHAPTER III. 
THE BARONS’ WAR. 
iene 


ONCE master of his realm, Henry the Third was quick 
to declare his plan of government. The two great checks 
on a merely personal rule lay as yet in the authority of 
the great ministers of State and in the national character 
of the administrative body which had been built up by 
Henry the Second. Both of these checks Henry at once 
set himself to remove. He would be his own minister. 
The Justiciar ceased to be the Lieutenant-General of the 
King and dwindled into a presiding judge of the law- 
courts. The Chancellor had grown into a great officer 
of State, and in 1226 this office had been conferred on 
the Bishop of Chichester by the advice and consent of 
the Great Council. But Henry succeeded in wresting 
the seal from him and naming to this as to other offices 
at his pleasure. His policy was to entrust all high posts 
of government to mere clerks of the royal chapel; trained 
administrators, but wholly dependent on the royal will. 
He found equally dependent agents of administration by 
surrounding himself with foreigners. ‘The return of 
Peter des Roches to the royal councils was the first sign 
of the new system; and hosts of hungry Poitevins and 
Bretons were summoned over to occupy the royal castles 
and fill the judicial and administrative posts about the 
Court. The King’s marriage in 1236 to Eleanor of Pro- 
vence was followed by the arrival in England of the new 
Queen’suncles. The “Savoy,” as hishousein the Strand 
was named, still recalls Peter of Savoy who arrived five 
years later to take for a while the chief place at Henry’s 

li 


258 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


council-board ; another brother, Boniface, was consecrated 
on Archbishop Edmund’s death to the highest post in the 
realm save the Crown itself, the Archbishoprie of 
Canterbury. The young Primate, lke his brother, 
brought with him foreign fashions strange enough to 
English folk. His armed retainers pillaged the markets. 
His own archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground the prior 
of St. Bartholomew-by-Smithfield who opposed his visita- 
tion. London was roused by the outrage; on the King’s 
refusal to do justice a noisy crowd of citizens surrounded 
the Primate’s house at Lambeth with cries of vengeance, 
and the “ handsome archbishop,” as_his followers styled 
him, was glad to escape over sea. This brood of Proven- 
cals was followed in 1248 by the arrival of the Poite- 
vin relatives of John’s queen, Isabella of Angouléme. 
Aymer was made Bishop of Winchester; William of 
Valence received at a later time the earldom of Pembroke. 
Even the King’s jester was a Poitevin. Hundreds of 
their dependants followed these great nobles to finda 
fortune in the English realm. The Poitevin lords brought 
in their train a bevy of ladies in search of husbands, and 
three English earls who were in royal wardship were 
wedded by the King to foreigners. ‘The whole machinery 
of administration passed into the hands of men who were 
ignorant and contemptuous of the principles of English 
government or English law. Their rule was a mere an- 
archy ; the very retainers of the royal household turned 
robbers and pillaged foreign merchants in the precincts 
of the Court; corruption invaded the judicature; at the 
close of this period of misrule Henry de Bath, a justi- 
ciary, was proved to have openly taken bribes and to have 
adjudged to himself disputed estates. 

That misgovernment of this kind should have gone on 
unchecked in defiance of the provisions of the Charter 
was owing to the disunion and sluggishness of the Eng- 
lish baronage. On the first arrival of the foreigners 
Richard, the Earl Mareschal, a son of the great Regent, 
stood forth as their leader to demand the expulsion of 
the strangers from the royal Council. Though deserted 
by the bulk of the nobles he defeated the foreign troops 


THE CHARTER. 12014—1291. 259 


sent against him and forced the King to treat for peace. 
But at this critical moment the Earl was drawn by an 
intrigue of Peter des Roches to Ireland ; he fell in a 
petty skirmish, and the barons were left without a head. 
The interposition of a new primate, Edmund of Abing- 
don, forced the King to dismiss Peter from court; but 
there was no real change of system, and the remon- 
strances of the Archbishop and of Robert Grosseteste, 
the Bishop of Lincoln, remained fruitless. In the long 
interval of misrule the financial straits of the King forced 
him to heap exaction on exaction. The Forest Laws 
were used as a means of extortion, sees and abbeys were 
kept vacant, loans were wrested from lords and prelates, 
the Court itself lived at free quarters wherever it moved. 
Supplies of this kind however were utterly insufficient 
to defray the cost of thc King’s prodigality. A sixth of 
the royal revenue was wasted in pensions to foreign 
favorites. The debts of the Crown amounted to four 
times its annual income. Henry was forced to appeal 
for aid to the great Council of the realm, and aid was 
granted in 1237 on promise of coutrol in its expenditure 
and on condition that the King confirmed the Charter. 
But Charter and promise were alike disregarded; and 
in 1242 the resentment of the barons expressed itself in 
a determined protest and a refusal of further subsidies. 
In spite of their refusal however Henry gathered money 
enough for a costly expedition for the recovery of Poitou. 
The attempt ended in failure and shame. At Taillebourg 
the King’s force fled in disgraceful rout before the French 
as far as Saintes, and only the sudden illness of Lewis 
the Ninth and a disease which scattered his army saved 
Bordeaux from the conquerors. The treasury was utterly 
drained, and Henry was driven in 1244 to make a fresh 
appeal with his own mouth to the baronage. But the 
barons had now rallied to a plan of action, and we can 
hardly fail to attribute their union to the man who ap- 
pears at their head. This was the Earl of Leicester, Si- 
mon of Montfort. | 

Simon was the son of another Simon of Montfort, whose 
name had become memorable for his ruthless crusade 


°60 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


against the Albigensian heretics in Southern Gaul, and 
who had inherited the Earldom of Leicester through his 
mother, a sister and co-heiress of the last Earl of the 
house of Beaumont. But as Simon’s tendencies were for 
the most part French John had kept the revenues of the 
earldom in his own hands, and on his death the claim of 
his elder son, Amaury, was met by the refusal of Henry 
the Third'to accept a divided allegiance. ‘The refusal 
marks the rapid growth of that sentiment of nationality 
which the loss of Normandy had brought home. Amaury 
chose to remain French, and by a family arrangement 
with the King’s sanction the honor of Leicester passed 
in 1231 to his younger brother Simon. His choice made 
Simon an Englishman, but his foreign blood still moved 
the jealousy of the barons,and this jealousy was quickened 
by a secret match in 1238 with Eleanor, the King’s sister 
and widow of the second William Marshal. ‘The match 
formed probably part of a policy which Henry pursued 
throughout his reign of bringing the great earldoms into 
closer connexion With the Crown. That of Chester had 
fallen to the King through the extinction of the family 
of its earls; Cornwall was held by his brother, Richard ; 
Salisbury by his cousin. Simon’s marriage linked the 
Earldom of Leicester to the royal house. But it at once 
brought Simon into conflict with the nobles and the 
Church. The baronage, justly indignant that such a 
step should have been taken without their consent, for 
the Queen still remained childless and Eleanor’s children 
by one whom they looked on as astranger promised to be 
heirs of the Crown, rose in a revolt which failed only 
through the desertion of their head, Earl Richard of 
Cornwall, who was satisfied with Earl Simon’s with- 
drawal from the Royal Council. The censures of the 
Church on Eleanor’s breach of a vow of chaste widow- 
hood which she had made at her first husband’s death 
were averted with hardly less difficulty by a journey to 
Rome. It was after a year of trouble that Simon returned 
to England to reap as it seemed the fruits of his high 
alliance. He was now formally made Earl of Leicester 
and re-entered the Royal Council. But it is probable 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. BEL 


that he still found there the old jealousy which had 
forced from him a pledge of retirement after his marriage ; 
and that his enemies now succeeded in winning over the 
King. In a few months, at any rate, he found the 
changeable King alienated from him, he was driven by a 
burst of royal passion from the realm, and was forced to 
spend seven months in France. 

Henry’s anger passed as quickly as it had risen, and in 
the spring of 1240 the Earl was again received with honor 
at court. It was from this moment however that his 
position changed. As yetit had been that of a foreigner, 
confounded in the eyes of the nation at large with the 
Poitevins and Provengals who swarmed about the court. 
But in the years of retirement which followed Simon’s 
return to England his whole attitude was reversed. 
There was as yet no quarrel with the King: he followed 
him In a campaign across the Channel, and shared in his 
defeat at Saintes. But he was a friend of Grosseteste. 
and a patron of the Friars, and became at last known as 
a steady opponent of the misrule about him. When pre- 
lates and barons chose twelve representatives to confer 
with Henry in 1244 Simon stood with Earl Richard of 
Cornwall at the head of them. A definite plan of 
reform disclosed his hand. The confirmation of the 
Charter was to be followed by the election of Justiciar, 
Chancellor, Treasurer in the Great Council. Nor was 
this restoration of a responsible ministry enough ; a per- 
petual Council was to attend the King and devise further 
reforms. The plan broke against Henry’s resistance and 
a Papal prohibition; but from this time the Earl took 
his stand in the front rank of the patriot leaders. The 
struggle of the following years was chiefly with the ex- 
actions of the Papacy, and Simon was one of the first to 
sign the protest which the Parliament in 1246 addressed 
to the court of Rome. He was present at the Lent Par- 
liament of 1248, and we can hardly doubt that he shared 
in its bold rebuke of the King’s misrule and its renewed 
demand for the appointment of the higher officers of 
state by the Council. It was probably a sense of the 
danger of leaving at home such a centre of all efforts 


262 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


after reform that brought Henry to send him in the au- 
tumn of 1248 as Seneschal of Gascony to save for the 
Crown the last of its provinces over sea. 

Threatened by France and by Navarre without as well 
as by revolt within, the loss of Gascony seemed close at 
hand; but in a few months the stern rule of the new 
Seneschal had quelled every open foe within or without 
its bounds. To bring the province to order proved a 
longerand a harder task. Its nobles were like the robber- 
nobles of the Rhine: “they rode the country by night,” 
wrote the Earl, “ like thieves,in parties of twenty or thirty 
or forty,” and gathered in leagues against the Seneschal, 
who set himself to exact their dues to the crown and to 
shield merchant and husbandman from their violence. 
For four years Earl Simon steadily warred down these 
robber bands, storming castles where there was need, 
and bridling the wilder country with a chain of forts. 
Hard as the task was, his real difficulty lay at home. 
Henry sent neither money nor men; and the Earl had to 
raise both from his own resources, while the men whom 
he was fighting found friends in Henry’s council-chamber. 
Again and again Simon was recalled to answer charges 
of tyranny and extortion made by the Gascon nobles and 
pressed by his enemies at home on the King. Henry’s 
feeble and impulsive temper left him open to pressure 
like this; and though each absence of the Earl from the 
province was a signal for fresh outbreaks of disorder 
which only his presence repressed, the deputies of its 
nobles were still admitted to the council-table and com- 
missions sent over to report on the Seneschal’s adminis- 
tration. The strife came to a head in 1252, when the 
commissioners reported that stern as Simon’s rule had 
been the case was one in which sternness was needful. 
The English barons supported Simon, and in the face of 
their verdict Henry was powerless. But the King was 
now wholly with his enemies; and his anger broke 
out in a violent altercation. The Earl offered to resign 
his post if the money he had spent was repaid him, and 
appealed to Henry’s word. Henry hotly retorted that he 
was bound by no promise to a false traitor. Simon at 


THE CHART. 1204—1291. 263 


once gave Henry the lie; “and but that thou bearest the 
name of King it had been a bad hour for thee when thou 
utteredst such a word!” A formal reconciliation was 
brought about, and the Earl once more returned to Gas- 
cony, but before winter had come he was forced to with- 
draw to France. The greatness of his reputation was 
shown in an offer which its nobles made him of the re- 
gency of their realm during the absence of King Louis 
from the land. But the offer was refused; and Henry, 
who had himself undertaken the pacification of Gascony, 
was glad before the close of 1253 to recall its old ruler 
to do the work he had failed to do. 

The Earl’s character had now thoroughly developed. 
He inherited the strict and severe piety of his father; he 
was assiduous in his attendance on religious ‘services 
whether by night or day. In his correspondence with 
Adam Marsh we see him finding patience under his 
Gascon troubles in a perusal of the Book of Job. His 
life was pure and singularly temperate; he was noted 
for his scant indulgence in meat, drink, or sleep. Socially 
he was cheerful and pleasant in talk; but his natural 
temper was quick and ardent, his sense of honor keen, 
his speech rapid and trenchant. His impatience of con- 
tradiction, his fiery temper, were in fact the great stum- 
bling-blocks in his after career. His best friends marked 
honestly this fault, and it shows the greatness of the man 
that he listened to their remonstrances. “ Better is a 
patient man,” writes honest Friar Adam, “ than a strong 
man, and he who can rule his own temper than he who 
storms a city.” But the one characteristic which over- 
mastered all was what men at that time called his “ con- 
stancy,”’ the firm immovable resolve which trampled 
even death under foot in its loyalty to the right. The 
motto which Edward the First chose as his device, 
“Keep troth,” was far truer as the device of Earl 
Simon. We see in his correspondence with what a clear 
discernment of its difficulties both at home and abyoad 
he “thought it unbecoming to decline the danger of 
so great an exploit” as the reduction of Gascony to 
peace and order; but once undertaken, he persevered in 


264 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


spite of the opposition he met with, the failure of all sup- 
port or funds from England, and the King’s desertion of 
his cause, till the work was done. There was the same 
steadiness of will and purpose in his patriotism. The 
letters of Robert Grosseteste show how early Simon had 
learned to sympathize with the Bishop in his resistance 
to Rome, and at the crisis of the contest he offered him 
his own support and that of his associates. But Robert 
passed away, and as the tide of misgovernment mountcd 
higher and higher the Earl silently trained himself for 
the day of trial. The fruit of his self-discipline was seen 
when the crisis came. While other men wavered and 
faltered and fell away, the enthusiastic love of the people 
clung to the grave, stern soldier who “stood like a 
pillar,” unshaken by promise or threat or fear of death, 
by the oath he had sworn. 

While Simon had been warring with Gascon rebels 
affairs in England had been going fiom bad to worse. 
The scourge of Papal taxation fell heavier on the clergy. 
After vain appeals to Rome and to the King, Archbishop 
Edmund retired to an exile of despair at Pontigny, and 
tax-gatherer after tax-gatherer with powers of excom- 
munication, suspension from orders, and presentation to 
benefices descended on the unhappy priesthood. The 
wholesale pillage kindled a wide spirit of resistance. 
Oxford gave the signal by hunting a papal legate out of 
the city amid cries of ‘“ usurer” and ‘“simoniac ” from 
the mob of students. Fulk Fitz-Warenne in the name 
of the barons bade a Papal collector begone out of Eng- 
land. ‘Ifyou tarry here three days longer,” he added, 
“ you and your company shall be cut to pieces.” For 
a time Henry himself was swept away by the tide of 
national indignation. Letters from the King, the nobles, 
and the prelates, protested against the Papal exactions, 
and orders were given that no money should be exported 
from the realm. But the thr at of interdict soon drove 
Henry back on a policy of spoliation in which he went 
hand in hand with Rome. The temper which this op- 
pression begot among even the most sober churchmen 
has been preserved for us by an annalist whose pages 


. THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 265 


glow with the new outburst of patriotic feeling. Mat- 
thew Paris is the greatest, as he in reality is the last, of 
our monastic historians. The school of St. Alban’s sur- 
vived indeed till a far later time, but its writers dwindle 
into mere annalists whose view is bounded by the abbey 
precincts and whose work is as colorless as it is jejune. 
In Matthew the breadth and precision of the narrative, the 
copiousness of his information on topics whether national 
or European, the general fairness and justice of his com- 
ments, are only surpassed by the patriotic fire and enthu- 
siasm of the whole. He had succeeded Roger of Wen- 
dover as chronicler at St. Alban’s; and the Greater 
Chronicle with an abridgment of it which long passed 
under the name of Matthew of Westminster, a “* History 
of the English,” and the “ Lives of the Earlier Abbots,” 
are only a few among the voluminous works which attest 
his prodigious industry. He was an artist as well as an 
historian, and many of the manuscripts which are pre- 
served are illustrated by his own hand. A large circle of 
correspondents—bishops like Grosseteste, ministers like 
Hubert de Burgh, officials like Alexander de Swereford 
—furnished him with minute accounts of political and 
ecclesiastical proceedings. Pilgrims from the East and 
Papal agents brought news of foreign events to his scrip- 
torium at St. Alban’s. He had access to and quotes 
largely trom state documents, charters, and exchequer 
rolls. Tho frequency of royal visits to the abbey brought 
him a store of political intelligence, and Henry himself 
contributed to the great chronicle which has preserved 
with so terrible a faithfulness the memory of his weak- 
ness and misgovernment. On one solemn feast-day the 
King recognized Matthew, and bidding him sit on the 
middle step between the floorand the throne begged him 
to write the story of the day’s proceedings. While on a 
visit to St. Alban’s he invited him to his table and cham- 
ber, and enumerated by name two hundred and fifty of 
the English baronies for his information. But all this 
royal patronage has left little mark on his work. ‘“ The 
case,’ as Matthew says, “of historical writers is hard, for 
if they tell the truth they provoke men, and if they write 


266 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


what is false they offend God.” With all the fulness of 
the school of court. historians, such as Benedict and 
Hoveden, to which in form he belonged, Matthew Paris 
combines an independence and patriotism which is 
strange to their pages. He denounces with the same 
unsparing energy the oppression of the Papacy and of the 
King. His point of aim is neither that of a courtier nor 
of a churchman but of an Englishman, and the new 
national tone of his chronicle is but the echo ofa national 
sentiment which at last bound nobles and yeomen and 
churchmen together into a people resolute to wrest free- 
dom from the Crown. 2 
The nation was outraged like the church. Two 
solemn confirmations of the Charter failed to bring about 
any compliance with its provisions, In 1248, in 1249, 
and again iy 1255 the great Council fruitlessly renewed 
its demand for a regular ministry, and the growing 
resolve of the nobles to enforce good government was seen 
in their offer of a grant on condition that the great officers 
of the Crown were appointed in the Council of the 
Baronage. But Henry refused their offer with scorn and 
sold his plate to the citizens of London to find payment 
for his household. A spirit of mutinous defiance broke 
out on the failure of all legal remedy. When the Earl 
of Norfolk refused him aid Henry answered with a threat. 
«I will send reapers and reap your fields for you,” he 
said. “ And I will sent you back the heads of your 
reapers,” replied the Earl. Hampered by the profusion 
of the court and the refusal of supplies, the Crown was 
in fact penniless; and yet never was money more wanted, 
for a trouble which had long pressed upon the English 
kings had now grown to a height that called for decisive 
action. Even his troubles at home could not blind Henry 
to the need of dealing with the difficulty of Wales. Of 
the three Welsh states into which all that remained un- 
conquered of Britain had been broken by the victories of 
Deorham and Chester, two had long ceased to exist. 
The country between the Clyde and the Dee had been 
gradually absorbed by the conquests of Northumbria and 
the growth of the Scot monarchy. West Wales, between 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 267 


the British Channel and the estuary of the Severn, had 
yielded to the sword of Eegberht. But a fiercer resist- 
ance prolonged the independence of the great central 
portion which alone in modern language preserves the 
name of Wales. Comprising in itself the largest and 
most powerful of the British kingdoms, it was aided in 
its struggle against Mercia by the weakness of its assailant, 
the youngest and feeblest of the English states, as well 
as by an internal warfare which distracted the energies 
of the invaders. But Mercia had no sooner risen to 
supremacy among the English kingdoms than it took the 
work of conquest vigorously in hand. Offa tore from 
Wales the border land between the Severn and the Wye ; 
the raids of his successors carried fire and sword into the 
heart of the country ; and an acknowledgement of the 
Mercian overlordship was wrested from the Welsh 
princes. On the fall of Mercia this overlordship passed 
to the West-Saxon kings, and the Laws of Howel Dda 
own the payment of a yearly tribute by “ the prince of 
Aberffraw ” to “ the King of London.” The weakness 
of England during her long struggle with the Danes 
revived the hopes of British independence; it was the 
co-operation of the Welsh on which the Northmen reck- 
oned in their attack on the house of Ecgberht. But with 
the fall of the Danelagh the British princes were again 
brought to submission, and when in the midst of the con- 
fessor’s reign the Welsh seized on a quarrel between the 
houses of Leofric and Godwine to cross the border and 
carry their attacks into England itself, the victories of 
Harold re-asserted the English supremacy. Disembarking 
on the coast his light-armed troops he penetrated to the 
heart of the mountains, and the successors of the Welsh 
prince Gruffydd, whose head was the trophy of the 
campaign, swore to observe the old fealty and render the 
whole tribute to the English Crown. 

A far more desperate struggle began when the wave 
of Norman conquest broke on the Welsh frontier. A 
chain of great earldoms, settled by William along the 
border-land, at once bridled the old marauding forays. 
From his county palatine of Chester Hugh the Wolf 


s 
268 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


harried Flintshire into a desert, Robert of Belesme in his 
earldom of Shrewsbury ‘slew the Welsh,” says a chron- 
icler, “ like sheep, conquered them, enslaved them and 
flayed them with nails of iron.” ‘The earldom of Glou- 
cester curbed Britain along the lower Severn. Backed 
by these greater baronies a horde of lesser adventurers ob- 
tained the royal “licence to make conquest on the Welsh. 
Monmouth and Abergavenny were seized and guarded by 
Norman castellans; Bernard of Neufmarché won the 
lordship of Brecknock ; Roger of Montgomery raised the 
town and fortress in Powysland which still preserves his 
name. A great rising of the whole people 1n the days of 
the second William won back some of this Norman spoil. 
The new castle of Montgomery was burned, Brecknock 
and Cardigan were cleared of the invaders, and the Welsh 
poured ravaging over the English border. Twice the 
Red King carried his arms fruitlessly among the moun- 
tains against enemies who took refuge in their fastnesses 
till famine and hardship drove his broken host into retreat. 
The wiser policy of Henry the First fell back on his 
father’s system of gradual conquest. A new tide of in- 
vasion flowed along the southern coast, where the land 
was level and open and accessible from the sea. The 
attack was aided by strife in the country itself. Robert | 
Fitz-Hamo, the lord of Gloucester, was summoned to his 
aid by a Welsh chieftain; and his defeat of Rhys ap 
Tewdor, the last prince under whom Southern Wales was 
united, produced an anarchy which enabled Robert to 
land safely on the coast of Glamorgan, to conquer the 
country round, and to divide it among his soldiers. A 
force of Flemings and Englishmen followed the Earl of 
Clare as he landed near Milford Haven and pushing back 
the British inhabitants settled a “ Little England ” in the 
present Pembrokeshire. A few daring adventurers ac- 
companied the Norman Lord of Kemeys into Cardigan, 
where land might be had for the winning by any one who 
would “ wage war on the Welsh.” | 
It was at this moment, when the utter subjugation of 
the British race seemed at hand, that a new outburst of 
energy rolled back the tide of invasion and changed the 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 269 


fitful resistance of the separate Welsh provinces into a 
national effort to regain independence. ‘To all outer 
seeming Wales had become utterly barbarous. Stripped 
of every vestige of the older Roman civilization by ages of 
bitter wartare, of civil strife, of estrangement from the 
general culture of Christendom, the unconquered Britons 
had sunk into a mass of savage herdsmen, clad in the 
skins and fed by the milk of the cattle they tended. 
Faithless, greedy, and revengeful, retaining no higher 
political organization than that of the clan, their strength | 
was broken by ruthless feuds, and they were united only 
in battle or in raid against the stranger. But in the 
heart of the wild people there still lingered a spark of 
the poetic fire which had nerved it four hundred years 
before through Aneurin and Llywarch Hen to its strug- 
gle with the earliest Englishmen. At the hour of its 
lowest degradation the silence of Wales was suddenly 
broken by a crowd of singers. The song of the twelfth 
century burst forth, not from one bard or another, but 
from the nation at large. The Welsh temper indeed was 
steeped in poetry. ‘In every house,’”’ says the shrewd 
Gerald du Barri, “ strangers who arrived in the morning 
were entertained till eventide with the talk of maidens 
and the music of the harp.’ <A romantic literature, 
which was destined to leaven the fancy of western Eu- 
rope, had grown up among this wild people and found an 
admirable means of utterance in its tongue. The Welsh 
language was as real a development of the old Celtic 
language heard by Cesar as the Romance tongues are 
developments of Cé&sar’s Latin, but ata far earlier date 
than any other language of modern Europe it had attained 
to. definite structure and to settled literary form. No 
other medizval literature shows at its outset the same 
elaborate and completed organization as that of the 
Welsh. But within these settled forms the Celtic fancy 
played with a startling freedom. In one of the later 
poems Gwion the Little transforms himself into a hare, 
a fish, a bird, a grain of wheat ; but he is only the sym- 
bol of the strange shapes in which the Celtic fancy em- 
bodies itself in the romantic tales which reached their 
highest perfection in the legends of Arthur. 


270 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


The gay. extravagance of these ‘‘Mabinogion” flings 
defiance to all fact, tradition, probability, and revels in 
the impossible and unreal. When Arthur sails into the 
unknown world it is ina ship of glass. The “descent 
into hell,” as a Celtic poet paints it shakes off the medieval 
horror with the medieval reverence, and the knight who 
achieves the quest spends his years of infernal durance 
in hunting and minstrelsy, and in converse with fair 
women. The world of the Mabinogion is a world of 
pure phantasy, a new earth of marvels and enchant- 
ments, of dark forests whose silence is broken by the 
hermit’s bell and sunny glades where the light plays on 
the hero’s armor. Each figure as it moves across the 
poet’s canvas is bright with glancing color. “The 
maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-colored silk, and 
about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold in which were 
precious emeralds and rubies. Her head was of brighter 
gold than the flower of the broom, her skin was whiter 
than the foam of the wave. And fairer were her hands 
and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemone 
amidst the spray of the meadow fountain. The eye of 
the trained hawk, the glance of the falcon, was not 
brighter than hers. Her bosom was more snowy than 
the breast of the white swan, her cheek was redder than 
the reddest roses.” Everywhere there is an Oriental pro- 
fusion of gorgeous imagery, but the gorgeousness is sel- 
dom oppressive. The sensibility of the Celtic temper, 
so quiek to perceive beauty, so eager in its thirst for life, 
its emotions, its adventures, its sorrows, its joys, is 
tempered by a passionate melancholy that expresses its 
revolt against the impossible, by an instinct of what is 
noble, by a sentiment that discovers the weird charm of 
nature. The wildest extravagance of the tale-teller is 
relieved by rome graceful play of pure fancy, some tender 
note of feeling, some magical touch of beauty. As Kalwehs 
greyhounds bound from side to side of their master’s 
steed, they “sport round him like two sea-swallows.” 
His spear is “ swifter than the fall of the dewdrop from 
the blade of reed-grass upon the earth when the dew of 
June is at the heaviest.” A subtle, observant love of 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. O71 


nature and natural beauty takes fresh color from the 
passionate human sentiment with which it is imbued. 
“IT love the birds,” sings Gwalchmai, ‘and their sweet 
voices in the lulling songs of the wood;” he watches at 
night beside the fords “among the untrodden grass” to 
hear the nightingale and watch the play of the sea-mew. 
Even patriotism takes the same picturesque form. The 
Welsh poet hates the flat and sluggish land of the Sax- 
on; as he dwells on his own he tells of “its sea-coast 
and its mountains, its towns on the forest border, its. 
fair landscape, its dales, its waters, and its valleys, its 
white sea-mews, its beauteous women.” Here as every- 
where the sentiment of nature passes swiftly and subtly 
into the sentiment of a human tenderness: “I love its 
fields clothed with tender trefoil” goes on the song; “I 
love the marches of Merioneth where my head was pil- 
lowed on a snow-white arm.” In the Celtic love of 
woman there is little of the Teutonic depth and earnest- 
ness, but in its stead a childlike spirit of delicate enjoy- 
ment, a faint distant flush of passion like the roselight 
of dawn on a snowy mountain peak, a playful delight in 
beauty. ‘* White is my love as the apple blossom, as the 
ocean’s spray; her face shines like the pearly dew on 
Eryri; the glow of her cheeks is like the light of sun- 
set.’ The buoyant and elastic temper of the French 
trouveur was spiritualized in the Welsh singers by a 
more refined poetic feeling. ‘ Whoso beheld her was 
filled with her love. Four white trefoils sprang up 
wherever she trod.” A touch of pure fancy such as this 
removes its object out of the sphere of passion into one 
of delight and reverence. 

It is strange to pass from the world of actual Welsh 
history into such a world as this. But side by side with 
this wayward, fanciful stream of poesy and romance ran 
a torrent of intenser song. The spirit of the earlier 
bards, their joy in battle, their love of freedom, broke 
out anew in ode after ode, in songs extravagant, monot- 
onous, often prosaic, but fused into poetry by the in- 
tense fire of patriotism which glowed within them. 
Every fight, every hero had its verse. The names of 


peg pd? HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


older singers, of Taliesin, Aneurin, and Llywarch Hen, 
were revived in bold torgeries to animate the national 
resistance and to prophesy victory. It was in North 
Wales that the spirit of patriotism received its strongest 
inspiration from this burst of song. Again and again 
Henry the Second was driven to retreat from the im- 
pregnable fastnesses where the “ Lords of Snowdon,” the 
princes of the house of Gruffydd ap Conan, claimed su- 
premacy over the whole of Wales. Once in the pass of 
Consilt a cry arose that the King was slain, Henry of 
Essex flung down the royal standard, and the King’s 
desperate efforts could hardly save his army from utter 
rout. The bitter satire of the Welsh singers bade him 
knight his horse, since its speed had alone saved him 
from capture. In a later campaign the invaders were 
met by storms of rain, and forced to abandon their bag- 
gage in a headlong flight to Chester. The greatest of 
the Welsh odes, that known to English readers in Gray’s 
translation as “ The Triumph of Owen,” is Gwalchmai’s 
song of victory over the repulse of an English fleet from 
Abermenai. 

The long reign of Llewelyn the son of Jorwerth seemed 
destined to realize the hopes of his countrymen. The 
homage which he succeeded in extorting from the whole 
of the Welsh chieftains during a reign which lasted from 
1194 to 1240 placed him openly at the head of his race, 
and gave a new character to its struggle with the English 
King. In consolidating his authority within his own do- 
mains, and in the assertion of his lordship over the princes 
of the south, Llewelyn ap Jorwerth aimed steadily at 
securing the means of striking off the yoke of the Saxon. 
It was in vain that John strove to buy his friendship*by 
the hand of his natural daughter Johanna. Fresh raids 
on the Marches forced the King to enter Wales in 1211; 
but though his army reached Snowdon it fell back like 
its predecessors, starved and broken before an enemy it 
could never reach. A second attack in the same year 
_had better success. The chieftains of South Wales were 
drawn from their new allegiance to join the English 
forces, and Llewelyn, prisoned in his fastnesses, was at 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 273 


last driven to submit. But the ink of the treaty was 
hardly dry before Wales was again on fire; a common 
fear of the English once more united its chieftains, and 
the war between John and his barons soon removed all 
dread of a new invasion. Absolved from his allegiance 
to an excommunicated King, and allied with the barons 
under Fitzwalter—too glad to enlist in their cause a 
prince who could hold in check the nobles of the border 
country where the royalist cause was strongest—Llewelyn 
seized his opportunity to reduce Shrewsbury, to annex. 
Powys, the central district of Wales where the English 
influence had always been powerful, to clear the royal 
garrisons from Caermarthen and Cardigan, and to force 
even the Flemings of Pembroke to do him homage. 
England watched these efforts of the subject race with 
an anger still mingled with contempt. ‘“ Who knows 
not,’ exclaims Matthew Paris as he dwells on the new 
pretensions of the Welshruler, “ who knows not that the 
Prince of Wales is a petty vassal of the King of England?” 
But the temper of Llewelyn’s own people was far other 
than the temper of the English chronicler. The hopes of 
Wales rose higher and higher with each triumph of the 
Lord of Snowdon. His court was crowded with bardic 
singers. ‘ He pours,” sings one of them, “ his gold into 
the lap of the bard as the ripe fruit falls from the trees.” 
Gold however was hardly needed to wake their enthusi- 
asm. Poet after poet sang of “the Devastator of Eng- 
land,” the ‘ Eagle of men that loves not to lie nor sleep,” 
“ towering above the rest of men with his long red lance,” 
his “red helmet of battle crested with a fierce wolf.” 
‘* The sound of his coming is like the roar of the wave as 
it rushes to the shore that can neither be stayed nor 
hushed.” Lesser bards strung together Liewelyn’s victo- 
ries in rough jingle of rime and hounded him on to the 
slaughter. ‘ Be of good courage in the slaughter,” sings 
Elidir, “ cling to thy work, destroy England, and plunder 
its multitudes.” <A fierce thirst for blood runs through 
the abrupt, passionate verses of the court singers. 
“Swansea, that tranquil town, was broken in heaps,” 
bursts outa triumphant bard; “ St. Clears, with its bright 


274 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


white lands, it is not Saxons who hold it now!” “In 
Swansea, the key of Lloegria, we made widows of all 
the wives.” ‘The dread Eagle is wont to lay corpses 
in rows, and to feast with the leader of wolves and with 
hovering ravens glutted with flesh, butchers with keen 
scent of carcases.” ‘ Better,” closes the song, “ better 
the grave than the life of man who sighs when the hours 
call him forth to the squares of battle.” | 

But even in bardice verse Llewelyn rises high out of 
the mere mob of chieftains who live by rapine, and boast 
as the Hirlas-horn passes from hand to hand through the 
hall that “they take and give no quarter.” “ Tender- 
hearted, wise, witty, ingenious,” he was “the great 
Cesar” who was to gather beneath his sway the broken 
fragments of the Celtic race. Mysterious prophecies, 
the prophecies of Merlin the Wise which floated from 
lip to lip and were heard even along the Seine and the 
Rhine, came home again to nerve Wales to its last strug- 
gle with the stranger. Medrawd and Arthur, men 
whispered, would appear once more on earth to fight 
over again the fatal battle of Camlan in which the hero- 
king perished. The last conqueror of the Celtic race, 
Cadwallon, still lived to combat for his people. The 
supposed verses of Taliesin expressed the undying hope 
of a restoration of the Cymry. “ In their hands shall be 
all the land from Britanny to Man: . . . a rumor shall 
arise that the Germans are moving out of Britain back 
again to their fatherland.” Gathered up in the strange 
work of Geoffry of Monmouth, these predictions had 
long been making a deep impression not on Wales only 
but on its conquerors. It was to meet the dreams of a 
yet living Arthur that the grave of the legendary hero- 
king at Glastonbury was found and visited by Henry the 
Second. But neither trick nor conquest could shake the 
firm faith of the Celt in the ultimate victory of his race. 
“Think you,” said Henry to a Welsh chieftain who 
joined his host, “that your people of rebels can with- 
stand my army?” ‘My people,” replied the chieftain, 
“may be weakened by your might, and even in great 
part destroyed, but unless the wrath of God be on the 


THE CHARTER.  1204—1291. OTD: 


side of its foe it will not perish utterly. Nor deem I 
that other race or other tongue will answer for this 
corner of the world before the Judge of all at the last 
day save this people and tongue of Wales.” So ran the 
popular rime, ‘The Lord they will praise, their speech 
they shall keep, their land they shall lose—except wild 
Wales.” 
Faith and prophecy seemed justified by the growing 
strength of the British people. The weakness and dis- 
sensions which characterized the reign of Henry the 
Third enabled Llewelyn ap Jorwerth to preserve a prac- 
tical independence till the close of his life, when a fresh 
acknowledgment of the English supremacy was wrested 
from him by Archbishop Edmund. But the triumphs of 
his arms were renewed by Llewelyn the son of Gryffydd, 
who followed him in 1246. The raids of the new chief- 
tain swept the border to the very gates of Chester, 
while his conquest of Glamorgan seemed to bind the 
whole people together in a power strong enough to meet 
any attack from the stranger. So pressing was the 
danger that it called the King’s eldest son, Edward, to 
the field; but his first appearance in arms ended ina 
crushing defeat. The defeat however remained un- 
avenged. Henry’s dreams were of mightier enterprizes 
than the reduction of the Welsh. The Popes were still 
fichting their weary battle against the House of Hohen- 
staufen, and were offering its kingdom of Sicily, which 
they regarded as a forfeited fief of the Holy See, to any 
power that would aid them im the struggle. In 1254 it 
\. was offered to the King’s second son, Edmund. With 

-‘mbecile pride Henry accepted the offer, prepared to 
* send an army across the Alps, and pledged England to 
repay the sums which the Pope was borrowing for the 
purposes of his war. In a parliament at the opening of 
1257 he demanded an aid and a tenth from the clergy. 
A fresh demand was made in 1258. But the patience of 
the realm was at last exhausted. Earl Simon had re- 
turned in 1253 from his government of Gascony, and the 
fruit of his meditations during the four vears of his quiet 
stay at home, a quiet broken only by short embassies to 


—OT6 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


France and Scotland which showed there was as yet no 
open quarrel with Henry, was seen in a league of the 
baronage and in their adoption of a new and startling 
policy. The past half century had shown both the 
strength and weakness of the Charter: its strength as a 
rallying-point for the baronage and a definite assertion . 
of rights which the King could be made to acknowledge ; 
its weakness in providing no means for the enforcement 
of its own stipulations. Henry had sworn again and 
again to observe the Charter, and his oath was no sooner 
taken than it was unscrupulously broken. The barons 
had secured the freedom of the realm; the secret of their 
long patience during the reign of Henry lay in the diffi- 
culty of securing its right administration. It was this 
difficulty which Earl Simon was prepared to solve when 
action was forced on him by the stir of the realm. A 
great famine added to the sense of danger from Wales 
and from Scotland and to the irritation at the new de- 
mands from both Henry and Rome with which the year 
1258 opened. It was to arrange for a campaign against 
Wales that Henry called a parliament in April. But 
the baronage appeared in arms with Gloucester and Lei- 
cester at théir head. The King was forced to consent to 
the appointment of a committee of twenty-four to draw 
up terms for the reform of the state. The twenty-four 
again met the Parliament at Oxford in June, and al- 
though half the committee consisted of royal ministers 
and favorites it was impossible to resist the tide of pop- 
ular feeling. Hugh Bigod, one of the firmest adherents 
of the two Earls, was chosen as Justiciar. The claim to 
elect this great officer was in fact the leading point in 
the baronial policy. But further measures were needed 
to hold in check such arbitrary misgovernment as had 
prevailed during the past twenty years. By the “ Pro- 
visions of Oxford” it was agreed that the Great Council — 
should assemble thrice in the year, whether summoned 
by the King or no; and on each occasion “the Com- 
monalty shall elect twelve honest men who shall come 
to the Parliaments, and at other times when occasion shall 
be when the King and his Council shall send for them, 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. yale 


to treat of the wants of the King and of his kingdom. 
And the Commonalty shall hold as established that which 
these Twelve shall do.” Three permanent committees 
of barons and prelates were named to carry out the work 
of reform and administration. The reform of the Church 
-was left to the original Twenty-Four ; a second Twenty- 
Four negotiated the financial aids; a Permanent Coun- 
cil of Fifteen advised the King in the ordinary work of 
Government. The complexity of such an arrangement 
was relieved by the fact that the members of each of 
these committees were in great part the same persons. 
The Justiciar, Chancellor, and the guardians of the 
King’s castles swore to act only with the advice and 
assent of the Permanent Council, and the first two great 
officers, with the Treasurer, were to give account of their 
proceedings to it at the end of the year. Sheriffs were 
to be appointed for a single year only, no doubt by the 
Council, from among the chief tenants of the county, 
and no undue fees were to be exacted for the adminis- 
tration of justice in their court. 

A royal proclamation in the English tongue, the first 
in that tongue since the Conquest which has reached us, 
ordered the observance of these Provisions. The King 
was in fact helpless, and resistance came only from the 
foreign favorites, who refused to surrender the castles 
and honors which had been granted to them. But the 
Twenty-four were resolute in their action; and an armed 
demonstration of the barons drove the foreigners in flight 
over sea. The whole royal power was now in fact in the 
hands of the committees appointed by the Great Council. 
But the measures of the barons showed little of the wis- 
dom and energy which the country had hoped for. In 
October, 1259, the knighthood complained that the barons 
had done nothing but seek their own advantage in the 
recent changes. This protest produced the Provisions 
of Westminster, which gave protection to tenants against 
their feudal lords, regulated legal procedure in the 
feudal courts, appointed four knights in each shire to 
watch the justice of the sheriffs, and made other tempo- 
rary enactments for the furtherance of justice. But 


978 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


these Provisions brought little fruit, and a tendency to 
mere feudal privilege showed itself in an exemption of 
all nobles and prelates from attendance at the Sheriff's 
courts. Their foreign policy was more vigorous and 
successful. All further payment to Rome, whether 
secular or ecclesiastical, was prohibited; formal notice 
was given to the Pope of England’s withdrawal from the 
Sicilian enterprise, peace put an end to the incursions of 
the Welsh, and negotiations on the footing of a formal 
abandonment of the King’s claim to Normandy, Anjou, 
Maine, Touraine, and Poitou ended in October, 1259, in 
a peace with France. 

This peace, the triumph of that English policy which 
had been struggling ever since the days of Hubert de 
Burgh with the Continental policy of Henry and his 
foreign advisers, was the work of the Earl of Leicester. 
The revolution had doubtless been mainly Simon’s doing. 
In the summer of 1258, while the great change was going 
on, a thunder storm drove the King as he passed along 
the river to the house of the Bishop of Durham where 
the Earl was then sojourning. Simon bade Henry take 
shelter with him and have no fear of the storm. The 
King refused with petulant wit. “If I fear the thunder, 
I fear you, Sir Earl, more than all the thunder in the 
world.’ But Simon had probably small faith in the 
cumbrous system of government which the Barons de- 
vised, and it was with reluctance that he was brought 
to swear to the Provisions of Oxford which embodied it. 
With their home government he had little to do, for 
from the autumn of 1258 to that of 1259 he was chiefly 
busied in negotiation in France. But already his breach 
with Gloucester and the bulk of his fellow councillors 
was marked. In the Lent Parliament of 1259 he had re- 
proached them, and Gloucester above all, with faithless- 
ness to their trust. “The things we are treating of,” he 
cried, ‘‘ we have sworn to carry out. With such feeble 
and faithless men I care not to have aught to do!” The 
peace with France was hardly signed when his distrust 
of his colleagues was verified. Henry’s withdrawal to the 
Fvench court at the close of the year for the formal sig: 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 279 


nature of the treaty was the signal for a reactionary 
movement. From France the King forbade the summon- 
ing of a Lent Parliament in 1260 and announced his re- 
sumption of the enterprise against Sicily. Both acts 
were distinct breaches of the Provisions of Oxford, but 
Henry trusted to the divisions of the Twenty-Four. 
Gloucester was in open feud with Leicester; the Jus- 
ticiar, Hugh Bigod, resigned his office in the spring; and 
both of these leaders drew cautiously to the King. 
Roger Mortimer and the Earls of Hereford and Norfolk. 
more openly espoused the royal cause, and in February, 
1260, Henry had gained confidence enough to announce 
that as the barons had failed to keep their part of the 
Provisions he should not keep his. 

Ear! Simon almost alone remained unshaken. But his 
growing influence was seen in the appointment of his 
supporter, Hugh Despenser, as Justiciar in Bigod’s place, 
while his strength was doubled by the accession of the 
King’s son Edward to his side. In the moment of the 
revolution Edward had vehemently supported the party 
of the foreigners. But he had sworn to observe the Pro- 
visions, and the fidelity to his pledge which remained 
throughout his life the chief note of his temper at once 
showed itself. Like Simon he protested against the 
faithlessness of the barons in the carrying out of their 
reforms, and it was his strenuous support of the petition 
of the knighthood that brought about the additional 
Provisions of 1259. -He had been brought up with Earl 
Simon’s sons, and with the Earl himself his relations re- 
mained friendly even at the later time of their fatal 
hostilities. But as yet he seems to have had no distrust 
of Simon’s purposes or policy. His adhesion to the Earl 
recalled Henry from France; and the King was at once 
joined by Gloucester in London while Edward and 
Simon remained without the walls. But the love of 
father and son proved too strong to bear political sever- 
ance, and Edward’s reconciliation foiled the Earl’s plans. 
He withdrew to the Welsh border, where fresh troubles 
were breaking out, while Henry prepared to deal his 
final blow at the government which, tottering as it was, 


280 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


still held him in check. Rome had resented the measures 
which had put an end to her extortions, and it was to 
Rome that Henry looked for a formal absolution from 
his oath to observe the Provisions. In June, 1261, he | 
produced a Bull annulling the Provisions and freeing 
him from his oath in a Parliament at Winchester. The 
suddenness of the blow forbade open protest and Henry 
quickly followed up his victory. Hugh Bigod, who had 
surrendered the Tower and Dover in the spring, sur- 
rendered the other castles he held in the autumn. Hugh 
Despenser was deposed from the Justiciarship and a roy- 
alist, Philip Basset, appointed in his place. 

The news of this counter-revolution reunited for a 
moment the barons. Gloucester joined Earl Simon in 
calling an autumn Parliament at St. Alban’s, and in 
summoning to it three knights from every shire south of 
Trent. But the union was a brief one. Gloucester con- 
sented to refer the quarrel with the King to arbitration 
and the Earl of Leicester withdrew in August to France. 
He saw that for the while there was no means of with- 
standing Henry, even in his open defiance of the Provi- 
sions. Foreign soldiers were brought into the land; the 
King won back again the appointment of sheriffs, For 
eighteen months of this new rule Simon could do noth- 
ing but wait. But his long absence lulled the old jeal- 
ousies against him. The confusion of the realm anda 
fresh outbreak of troubles in Wales renewed the disgust 
at Henry’s government, while his unswerving faithful- 
ness to the Provisions fixed the eyes of all Englishmen 
upon the Earl as their natural leader. The death of 
Gloucester in the summer of 1262 removed the one bar- 
rier to action; and in the spring of 1263 Simon landed 
again in England as the unquestioned head of the baro- 
nial party. What immediately forced him to action was 
‘a march of Edward with a body of foreign troops against 
Llewelyn, who was probably by this time in communica- 
tion if not in actual alliance with the Earl. The chief 
opponents of Llewelyn among the Marcher Lords were 
ardent supporters of Henry’s misgovernment, and when 
a common hostility drew the Prince and Earl together, 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 281 


the constitutional position of Llewelyn as an English 
noble gave formal justification for co-operation with 
‘him. At Whitsuntide the barons met Simon at Oxford 
and finally summoned Henry to observe the Provisions. 
His refusal was met by an appeal to arms. Throughout 
the country the younger nobles flocked to Simon’s stand- 
ard, and the young Earl of Gloucester, Gilbert of Clare, 
became his warmest supporter. His rapid movements 
foiled all opposition. While Henry vainly strove to 
raise money and men, Simon swept the Welsh border, 
marched through Reading on Dover, and finally ap- 
peared before London. 

The Earl’s triumph was complete. Edward after a 
brief attempt at resistance was forced to surrender 
Windsor and disband his foreign troops. The rising of 
London in the cause of the barons left Henry helpless. 
But at the moment of triumph the Earl saw himself 
anew forsaken. The bulk of the nobles again drew to- 
wards the King; only six of the twelve barons who had 
formed the patriot half of the committee of 1258, only 
four of the twelve representatives of the community at 
that date, were now with the Earl. The dread too of 
civil war gave strength to the ery for a compromise, and 
at the end of the year it was agreed that the strife 
should be left to the arbitration of the French King, 
Lewis the Ninth. But saint and just ruler as he was, 
the royal power was in the conception of Lewis a divine 
thing, which no human power could limit or fetter, and 
his decision, which was given in January, 1264, annulled 
the whole of the Provisions. Only the Charters granted 
before the Provisions were to be observed. The ap- 
pointment and removal of all officers of state was to be 
wholly with the King, and he was suffered to call aliens 
to his councils if he would. The Mise of Amiens was 
at once confirmed by the Pope, and crushing blow as it 
was, the barons felt themselves bound by the award. It 
was only the exclusion of aliens—a point which they 
had not purposed to submit to arbitration—which they 
refused to concede. Luckily Henry was as inflexible on 
this point as on the rest, and the mutual distrust pre- 
vented any real accommodation. ; 


282 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


But Henry had to reckon on more than the baronage. 
Deserted as he was by the greater nobles, Simon was far 
from standing alone. Throughout the recent struggle 
the new city governments of the craft-gilds, which were 
known by the name of “ Communes,” had shown an en- 
thusiastic devotion to his cause. The Queen was stopped 
in her attempt to escape from the Tower by an angry 
mob, who drove her back with stones and foul words. 
When Henry attempted to surprise Leicester in his quar- 
ters at Southwark, the Londoners burst the gates which 
had been locked by the richer burghers against him, and 
rescued him by a welcome into the city. Theclergy and 
the universities went in sympathy with the towns, and 
in spite of the taunts of the royalists, who accused him 
of seeking allies against the nobility in the common peo- 
ple, the popular enthusiasm gave a strength to the Earl 
which sustained him even in this darkest hour of the 
struggle. He at once resolved on resistance. The French 
award had luckily reserved the rights of Englishmen to 
the liberties they had enjoyed before the Provisions of 
Oxford, and it was easy for Simon to prove that the ar- 
bitrary power it gave to the Crown was as contrary to 
the Charter as to the Provisions themselves. London was 
the first to reject the decision; in March 1264 its citi- 
zeas mustered atthe call of the town-bell at Saint Paul’s, 
seized the royal officials, and plundered the royal parks. 
Bat an army had already mustered in great force at the 
King’s summons, while Leicester found himself deserted 
by the bulk of the baronage. Every day brought news 
ofill. A detachment from Scotland joined Henry’s forces. 
‘The younger De Montfort was taken prisoner. North- 
ampton was captured, the King raised the siege of 
Rochester, and a rapid march of Earl Simon’s only saved 
London itself from a surprise by Edward. But betrayed 
as he was, the Earl remained firm to the cause. He 
would fight to the end, he said, even were he and his 
sons left to fight alone. With an army reinforced by 
15,000 Londoners, he marched in May to the relief of 
the Cinque Ports which were now threatened by the 
King. Jiven on the march he was forsaken by many of 


. 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 283 


the nobles who followed him. Halting at Fletching in 
Sussex, a few miles from Lewes, where the royal army 
was encamped, Earl Simon with the young Earl of Glou- 
cester offered the King compensation for all damage if 
he would observe the Provisions. Henry’s answer was 
one of defiance, and though numbers were against him, the 
Earl resolved on battle. His skill as a soldier reversed 
the advantages of the ground; marching at dawn on the 
14th of May he seized the heights eastward of the town 
and moved down these slopes to an attack. His men 
with white crosses on back and breast knelt in prayer 
before the battle opened, and all but reached the town 
before their approach was perceived. Edward however 
opened the fight by a furious charge which broke the 
Londoners on Leicester’s left. In the bitterness of his 
hatred for the insult to his mother he pursued them for 
four miles, slaughtering three thousand men. But he re- 
turned to find the battle lost. Crowded in the narrow 
space between the heights and the river Ouse, a space 
broken by marshes and by the long street of the town, 
the royalist centre and left were crushed by Earl Simon. 
The Earl of Cornwall, now King of the Romans, who, as 
the mocking song of the victors ran, “makede him a 
castel of a mulne post”’ (“he weened that the mill-sails 
were mangonels” goes on the sarcastic verse), was taken 
prisoner, and Henry himself captured. Edward cut his 
way into the Priory only to join in his father’s surrender. 

The victory of Lewes placed Earl Simon at the head 
of the state. ‘ Now England breathes in the hope of 
liberty,” sang a poet of the time; “the English were de- 
spised like dogs, but now they have lifted up their head 
and their foes are vanquished.” But the moderation of 
the terms agreed upon in the Mise of Lewes, a conven- 
tion between the King and his captors, shows Simon’s 
sense of the difficulties of his position. The question of 
the Provisions was again to be submitted to arbitration; 
and a parliament in June, to which four knights were 
summoned from every county, placed the administration 
till this arbitration was complete in the hands of a new 
council of nine to be nominated by the Earls of Leicester 


284 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


and Gloucester and the patriotic Bishop of Chichester. 
Responsibility to the community was provided for by the 
declaration of a right in the body of barons and prelates 
to remove either of the Three Electors, who in turn 
could displace or appoint the members of the Council. 
Such a constitution was of a different order from the 
cumbrous and oligarchical committees of 1258. But it 
had little time to work in. The plans for a fresh arbi- 
tration broke down. Lewis refused to review his de- 
cision, and all schemes for setting fresh judges between 
the King and his people were defeated by a formal con- 
demnation of the barons’ cause issued by the Pope. 
Triumphant as he was indeed Earl Simon’s difficulties 
thickened every day. The Queen with Archbishop 
Boniface gathered an army in France for an invasion ; 
Roger Mortimer with the border barons was still in arms 
and only held in check by Llewelyn. It was impossible 
to make binding terms with an imprisoned King, yet to 
release Henry without terms was to renew the war. 
The imprisonment too gave a shock to public feeling 
which thinned the Earl’s ranks. In the new Parliament 
which he called at the opening of 1265 the weakness of 
the patriotic party among the baronage was shown in 
the fact that only twenty-three earls and barons could 
be found to sit beside the hundred and twenty eccle- 
slasties. 

But it was just this sense of his weakness which 
prompted the Earl to an act that has done more than any 
incident of this struggle to immortalize his name. Had 
the strife been simply a strife for power between the ~ 
king and the baronage the victory of either would have 
been equally fatal in its results. The success of the one 
would have doomed England to a royal despotism, that 
of the other to a feudal aristocracy. Fortunately for our 
freedom the English baronage had been brought too low 
by the policy of the kings to be able to withstand the 
crown single-handed. From the first moment of the con- 
test it had been forced to make its cause a national one. 
The summons of two knights from each county, elected 
in its county court, to a Parliament in 1254, even before 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 285 


the opening of the struggle, was a recognition of the 
political weight of the country gentry which was con- 
firmed by the summons of four knights from every county 
to the Parliament assembled after the battle of Lewes. 
The Provisions of Oxford, in stipulating for attendance 
and counsel on the part of twelve delegates of the “ com- 
monalty,” gave the first indication of a yet wider appeal 
to the people at large. But it was the weakness of his 
party among the baronage at this great crisis which drove 
Earl Simon to a constitutional change of mighty issue in 
our history. As before, he summoned two knights from 
every county. But he created a new force in English 
politics when he summoned to sit beside them two 
citizens from every borough. The attendance of delegates 
from the towns had long been usual in the county courts 
when any matter respecting their interests was in ques- 
tion; but it was the writ issued by Earl Simon that first 
summoned the merchant and the trader to sit beside the 
knight of the shire, the baron, and the bishop in the par- 
lament of the realm. 

It is only this great event however which enables us 
to understand the large and prescient nature of Earl 
Simon’s designs. Hardly a few months had passed away 
since the victory of Lewes when the burghers took their 
seats at Westminster, yet his government was tottering 
to its fall. We know little of the Parliament’s acts. It 
seems to have chosen Simon as Justiciar and to have 
provided for Edward’s liberation, though he was still to 
live under surveillance at Hereford and to surrender his 
earldom of Chester to Simon, who was thus able to 
communicate with his Welsh allies. The Earl met the 
dangers from without with complete success. In Sep- 
tember 1264 a general muster of the national forces on 
Barham Down and a contrary wind put an end to the 
projects of invasion entertained by the mercenaries whom 
the Queen had collected in Flanders; the threats of 
France died away into negotiations; the Papal Legate 
was forbidden to cross the Channel, and his bulls of ex- 
communication were flung into the sea. But the 
difficulties at home grew more formidable every day. 


286 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


The restraint upon Henry and Edward jarred against 
the national feeling of loyalty, and estranged the mass 
of Englishmen who always side with the weak. Small 
as the patriotic party among the barons had been from 
the first, it grew smaller as dissensions broke out over 
the spoils of victory. The Earl’s justice and resolve to 
secure the public peace told heavily against him. John 
Giffard left him because he refused to allow him to exact 
ransom from a prisoner, contrary to the agreement made 
after Lewes. A great danger opened when the young 
Earl of Gloucester, though enriched with the estates of 
the foreigners, held himself aloof from the Justiciar, and 
resented Leicester’s prohibition of a tournament, his 
naming the wardens of the royal castles by his own 
authority, his holding Edward’s fortresses on the Welsh 
marches by his own garrisons. 

Gloucester’s later conduct proves the wisdom of 
Leicester’s precautions. In the spring Parliament of 
1295 he openly charged the Earl with violating the 
Mise of Lewes, with tyranny, and with aiming at the 
crown. Before its close he withdrew to his own lands 
in the west and secretly allied himself with Roger Mor- 
timer and the Marcher barons. Earl Simon soon followed 
him to the west, taking with him the King and Edward. 
He moved along the Severn, securing its towns, advanced 
westward to Hereford, and was marching at the end of 
June along bad roads into the heart of South Wales to 
attack the fortresses of Earl Gilbert in Glamorgan when 
Edward suddenly made his escape from Hereford and 
jeined Gloucester at Ludlow. The moment had been 
skilfully chosen, and Edward showed a rare ability in 
the movements by which he took advantage of the Earl’s 
position. Moving rapidly along the Severn he seized 
Gloucester and the bridges across the river, destroyed 
the ships by which Leicester strove to escape across the 
Channel to Bristol, and cut him off altogether from 
England. By this movement too he placed himself 
between the Earl and his son Simon, who was advancing 
from the East to his father’s relief. Turning rapidly on 
this second force Edward surprised it at Kenilworth and 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 287 


drove it with heavy loss within the walls of the castle. 
But the success was more than compensated by the op- 
portunity which his absence gave to the Earl of breaking 
the line of the Severn. Taken by surprise and isolated 
as he was, Simon had been forced to seek for aid and 
troops in an avowed alliance with Llewelyn, and it was 
with Welsh reinforcements that he turned to the east. 
But the seizure of his ships and of the bridges of the 
Severn held him a prisoner in Edward’s grasp, and a fierce 
attack drove him back, with broken and starving forces, 
into the Welsh hills. In utter despair he struck north- 
ward to Hereford; but the absence of Edward now 
enabled him on the 2d of August to throw his troops in 
boats across the Severn below Worcester. The news 
drew Edward quickly back in a fruitless counter-march 
to the river, for the Earl had already reached Evesham 
by a long nicht march on the morning of the 4th, while 
his son, relieved in turn by Edward’s counter-march, 
had pushed in the same night to the little town of Al- 
cester. The two armies were now but some ten miles 
apart, and their junction seemed secured. But botla 
were spent with long marching, and while the Earl, 
listening reluctantly to the request of the King whe 
accompanied him, halted at Evesham for mass and dinner, 
the army of the younger Simon halted for the same 
purpose at Alcester. 

“ Those two dinners doleful were, alas!” sings Robert 
of Gloucester; for through the same memorable night 
Edward was hurrying back from the Severn by country 
cross-lanes to seize the fatal gap that lay between them. 
As morning broke his army lay across the road that led 
northward from Evesham to Alcester. Evesham lies in 
a loop of the river Avon where it bends to the south ; 
and a height on which Edward ranged his troops closed 
the one outlet from it save across the river. Buta force 
had been thrown over the river under Mortimer to seize 
the bridges, and all retreat was thus finally cut off. The 
approach of Edward’s army called Simon to the front, 
and for the moment he took it for his son’s. Though 
the hope soon died away a touch of soldierly pride moved 


288 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


him as he recognized in the orderly advance of his 
enemies a proof of his own training. ‘“ By the arm of 
St. James,” he cried, “ they come on in wise fashion, but 
it was from me that they learnt it.” A glance however 
satisfied him of the hopelessness of a struggle; it was 
impossible for a handful of horsemen with a mob of half 
armed Welshmen to resist the disciplined knighthood of 
the royal army. ‘Let us commend our souls to God,” 
Simon said to the little group around him, “for our 
bodies are the foe’s.” He bade Hugh Despenser and the 
rest of his comrades fly from the field. “If he died,” 
was the noble answer, “ they had no will to live.” In 
three hours the butchery was over. The Welsh fled at 
the first onset like sheep, and were cut ruthlessly down 
in the cornfields and gardens where they sought refuge. 
The little group of knights around Simon fought des- 
perately, falling one by one till the Earl was left alone. 
So terrible were his sword-strokes that he had all but 
eained the hill top when a lance thrust brought his horse 
to the ground, but Simon still rejected the summons to 
yield till a blow from behind felled him mortally wounded © 
to the ground. Then with a last ery of “It is God’s 
grace,’ the soul of the great patriot passed away. 

The triumphant blare of trumpets which welcomed 
the rescued King into Evesham, “his men weeping for 
joy,” rang out in 1 bitter contrast to the mourning of the 
realm. It sounded like the announcement of a reign of 
terror. The rights and laws for which men had toiled 
and fought so long seemed to have been swept away in 
an hour. Every town which had supported Earl Simon 
was held to be at the King’s mercy, its franchises to be 
forfeited. The Charter of Lynn was annulled; London 
was marked out as the special object of Henry’s ven- 
geance, and the farms and merchandise of its citizens 
were seized as first-fruits of its plunder. The darkness: 
which on that fatal morning hid their books from the 
monks of Evesham as they sang in choir was but a 
presage of the gloom which fell on the religious houses. 


From Ramsay, from Evesham, from St. Alban’s rose the ~ . 


same cry of havoc and rapine. But the plunder of monk 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 289 


and burgess was little to the vast sentence of confiscation 
which the mere fact of rebellion was held to have passed 
on all the adherents of Earl Simon. To “ disinherit” 
these of their lands was to confiscate half the estates of 
the landed gentry of England; but the hotter royalists 
declared them disinherited, and Henry was quick to 
lavish their lands away on favorites and foreigners. The 
very chroniclers of their party recall the pillage with 
shame. But all thought of resistance lay hushed in a 
general terror. Even the younger Simon “saw no other 
rede” than to release his prisoners. His army, after 
finishing its meal, was again on its march to join the 
Earl when the news of his defeat met it, heralded by a 
strange darkness that, rising suddenly in the north-west 
and following as it were on Edward’s track, served to 
shroud the mutilations and horrors of the battle-field. 
The news was soon fatally confirmed. Simon himself 
could see from afar his father’s head borne off on a spear- 
point to be mocked at Wigmore. But the pursuit 
streamed away southward and westward through the 
streets of Tewkesbury, heaped with corpses of the panic- 
struck Welshmen whom the townsmen slaughtered 
without pity ; and there was no attack as the little force 
fell back through the darkness and big thunder-drops in 
despair upon Kenilworth. ‘“ I may hang up my axe,” are 
the bitter words which a poet attributes to their leader, 
“for feebly have I gone;” and once within the castle he 
gave way to a wild sorrow, day after day tasting neither 
meat nor drink. 

He was roused into action again by news of the shame- 
ful indignities which the Marcher-lords had offered to 
the body of the great Earl before whom they had trem- 
bled so long. The knights around him broke out at the 
tidings in a passionate burst of fury, and clamored for 
the blood of Richard of Cornwall and his son, who were 
prisoners in the castle. But Simon had enough -noble- 
ness left to interpose. “To God and him alone was it 
owing” Richard owned afterwards “ that I was snatched 
from death.” The captives were not only saved, but set 
free. A Parliament had been called at Winchester at 

’ 19 


290 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the opening of September, and its mere assembly prom- 
ised an end to the reign of utter lawlessness. A power- 
ful party, too, was known to exist in the royal camp 

which, hostile as it had shown itself to Earl Simon, — 
shared his love for English liberties, and the liberation 
of Richard was sure to aid its efforts. At the head of 
this party stood the young Earl of Gloucester, Gilbert of 
Clare, to whose action above all the Earl’s overthrow 
was due. And with Gilbert stood Edward himself. The 
passion for law, the instinct of good government, which 
were to make his reign so memorable in our history, had 
declared themselves from the first. He had sided with 
the barons at the outset of their struggle with Henry , 
he had striven to keep his father true to the Provisions 
of Oxford. It was only when the figure of Earl Simon 
seemed to tower above that of Henry himself, when the 
Crown seemed falling into bondage, that Edward passed 
to the royal side; and now that the danger which he 
dreaded was over he returned to his older attitude. In 
the first flush of victory, while the doom of Simon was 
as yet unknown, Edward had stood alone in desiring his 
captivity against the cry of the Marcher-lords for his 
blood. When all was done he wept over the corpse of 
his cousin and playfellow, Henry de Montfort, and fol- 
lowed the Earl’s body to the tomb. But great as was 
Edward’s position after the victory of Evesham, his 
moderate counsels were as yet of little avail. His efforts 
in fact were met. by those of Henry’s second son, Ed- 
mund, who had received the lands and earldom of Earl 
Simon, and whom the dread of any restoration of the 
house of De Montfort set at the head of the ultra-royal- 
ists. Nor was any hope of moderation to be found in 
the Parliament which met in September 1265. It met 
in the usual temper of a restoration-Parliament to legal- 
ize the outrages of the previous month. The prisoners 
who had been released from the dungeons of the barons 
poured into Winchester to add fresh violence to the de- 
mands of the Marchers. The wives of the captive 
loyalists and the widows of the siain were summoned to 
give fresh impulse to the reaction. Their place of meet- 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 291 


ing added fuel to the fiery passions of the throng, for 
Winchester was fresh from its pillage by the younger 
Simon on his way to Kenilworth, and its stubborn 
loyalty must have been fanned into a flame by the 
losses it had endured. In such an assembly no voice of 
moderation could find a hearing. The four bishops who 
favored the national cause, the bishops of London and 
Lincoln, of Worcester and Chichester, were excluded 
from it, and the heads of the religious houses were 
summoned for the mere purpose of extortion. Its 
measures were but a confirmation of the violence which 
had been wrought. All grants made during the King’s 
‘captivity’ were revoked. The house of De Montfort 
was banished from the realm. The charter of London 
was annulled. The adherents of Earl Simon were dis- 
inherited and seizin of their lands was given to the King. 

Henry at once appointed commissioners to survey and 
take possession of his spoil while he moved to Windsor 
to triumph in the humiliation of London, Its mayor and 
forty of its chief citizens waited in the castle yard only 
to be thrown into prison in spite of a safe-conduct, and 
Henry entered his capital in triumph as into an enemy’s 
city. The surrender of Dover came to fill his cup of 
joy, for Richard and Amaury of Montfort had sailed with 
the Earl’s treasure to enlist foreign mercenaries, and it 
was by this port that their force was destined to land. 
But a rising of the prisoners detained there compelled 
its surrender in October, and the success of the royalists 
seemed complete. In reality their difficulties were but 
beginning. Their triumph over Earl Simon had been a 
triumph over the religious sentiment of the time, and re- 
ligion avenged itself in its own way. Everywhere the 
Earl’s death was looked upon as a martyrdom; and monk 
and friar united in praying for the souls of the men who 
fell at Evesham as for soldiers of Christ. It was soon 
whispered that Heaven was attesting the sanctity of De 
Montfort by miracles at his tomb. How great was the 
effect of this belief was seen in the efforts of King and 
Pope to suppress the miracles, and in their continuance 
not only through the reign of Edward the First but even 


Y¥92 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


in the days of his successor. But its immediate result 
was a sudden revival of hope. ‘Sighs are changed into 
songs of praise,” breaks out a monk of the time, “and the 
greatness of our former joy has come to life again!” 
Ivor was it in miracles alone that the “ faithful,” as they 
proudly styled themselves, began to look for relief “from 
the oppression of the malignants.” A monk of St. Alban’s 
who was penning a eulogy of Earl Simon in the midst of 
this uproar saw the rise of a new spirit of resistance in 
the streets of the little town. In dread of war it was 
«uarded and strongly closed with bolts and bars, and re- 
fused entrance to all strangers, and above all to horse- 
men, who wished to pass through. The Constable of 
Hertford, an old foe of the townsmen, boasted that spite 
of bolts and bars he would enter the place and carry off 
four of the best villains captive. He contrived to make 
his way in; but as he loitered idly about a butcher who 
passed by heard him ask his men how the wind stood. 
The butcher guessed his design to burn the town, and 
felled him to the ground. The blow roused the towns- 
men. ‘They secured the Constable and his followers, 
struck off their heads, and fixed them at the four corners 
of the borough. ; 
The popular reaction gave fresh heart to the younger 
Simon. Quitting Kenilworth, he joined in November 
John D’Eyvill and Baldewin Wake in the Isle of Axholme 
where the Disinherited were gathering in arms. So fast 
did horse and foot flow in to him that Edward himself 
hurried into Lincolnshire to meet this new danger... He 
saw that the old strife was just breaking out again. The 
garrison of Kenilworth scoured the country; the men of 
the Cinque Ports, putting wives and children on board 
their barks, swept the Channel and harried the coasts; 
while Llewelyn, who had brought about the dissolution 
of Parliament by a raid upon Chester, butchered the 
forces sent against him and was master of the border. 
The one thing needed to link the forces of resistance to- 
sether was ahead, and such a head the appearance of 
Simon at Axholme seemed to promise. But Edward was 
resolute in his plan of conciliation. Arriving before the 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 293 


camp at the close of 1265, he at once entered into nego- 
tiations with his cousin, and prevailed on him to quit the 
island and appear before the King. Richard of Cornwall 
welcomed Simon at the court, he presented him to Henry 
as the saviour of his life, and on his promise to surrender 
Kenilworth Henry gave him the kiss of peace. In spite 
of the opposition of Roger Mortimer and the Marcher- 
lords success seemed to be crowning this bold stroke of 
the peace party when the Earl of Gloucester interposed. 
Desirous as he was of peace, the blood of De Montfort 
lay between him and the Earl’s sons, and the safety of 
the one lay in the ruin of the other. In the face of this 
danger Earl Gilbert threw his weight into the scale of 
the ultra-royalists, and peace became impossible. The 
question of restitution was shelved by a reference to ar- 
bitrators; and Simon, detained in spite of a safe-conduct, 
moved in Henry’s train at Christmas to witness the sur- 
render of Kenilworth which had been stipulated as the 
price of his full reconciliation with the King. But hot 
blood was now stirred again on both sides. The garrison 
replied to the royal summons by a refusal to surrender. 
They had received ward of the castle, they said, not from 
Simon but from the Countess, and to none but her would 
they give it up. The refusal was not likely to make 
Simon’s position an easier one. On his return to London 
the award of the arbitrators bound him to quit the realm 
and not to return save with the assent of King and bar- 
onage when all were at peace. He remained for a while 
in free custody at London; but warnings that he was 
doomed to life-long imprisonment drove him to flight, 
and he finally sought a refuge over sea. 

His escape set England againon fire. Llewelyn wasted 
the border; the Cinque Ports held the sea; the garrison 
of Kenilworth pushed their raids as far as Oxford; Balde- 
win Wake with a band of the Disinherited threw himself 
into the woods and harried the eastern counties; Sir 
Adam Gurdon, a knight of gigantic size and renowned 
prowess, wasted with a smaller party the shires of the 
south. In almost every county bands of outlaws were 
seeking a livelihood in rapine and devastation, while the 


A: HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


royal treasury stood empty and the enormous fine im- 
posed upon London had been swept into the coffers of 
French usurers. But a stronger hand than the King’s 
was now at the head of affairs, and Edward met his as- 
sailants with untiring energy. King Richard’s son, 
Henry of Almaine, was sent with a large force to the 
north; Mortimer hurried to hold the Welsh border ; 
Edmund was despatched to Warwick to hold Kenilworth 
in check; while Edward himself marched at the opening 
of March to the south. The Berkshire woods were soon 
cleared, and at Whitsuntide Edward succeeded in dis- 
persing Adam Gurdon’s band and in capturing its re- 
nowned leader in single combat. The last blow was 
already given to the rising of the north, where Henry of 
Almaine surprised the Disinherited at Chesterfield and 
took their leader, the Earl of Derby, in his bed. Though 
Edmund had done little but hold the Kenilworth 
knights in check, the submission of the rest of the 
country now enabled the royal army to besiege it in force. 
But the King was penniless, and the Parliament which 
he called to replenish his treasury in August showed the 
resolve of the nation that the strife should cease. They 
would first establish peace, if peace were possible, they 
said, and then answer the King’sdemand. Twelve com- 
missioners, with Earl Gilbert at their head, were ap- 
pointed on Henry’s assent to arrange terms of reconcilia- 
tion. They at once decided that none should be utterly 
disinherited for their partin the troubles, but that liberty 
of redemption should be left open to all. Furious at the 
prospect of being forced to disgorge their spoil, Mortimer 
and the ultra-royalists broke out in mad threats of*vio- 
lence, even against the life of the Papal legate who had 
pressed for the reconciliation. But the power of the 
ultra-royalists was over. The general resolve was not 
to be shaken by the clamor of a faction, and Mortimer’s 
rout at Brecknock by Llewelyn, the one defeat that 
checkered the tide of success, had damaged that leader’s 
influence. Backed by Edward and Earl Gilbert, the 
legite met their opposition with a threat of excommuni- 
ce?’ ion, and Mortimer withdrew sullenly from the camp. 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 295 


Fresh trouble in the country and the seizure of the Isle 
of Ely by a band of the Disinherited quickened the labors 
of the Twelve. At the close of September they pro- 
nounced their award, restoring their lands to all who 
made submission on a graduated scale of redemption, 
promising indemnity for all wrongs done during the 
troubles, and leaving the restoration of the house of De 
Montfort to the royal will. But to these provisions were 
added an emphatic demand that “the King fully keep 
and observe those liberties of the Church, charters of 
liberties, and forest charters, which he is expressly and 
by his own mouth bound to preserve and keep.” “ Let 
the King,” they add, ‘ establish on a lasting foundation 
those concessions which he has hitherto made of his own 
will and not on compulsion, and those needful ordinances 
which have been devised by his subjects and by his own 
good pleasure.” 

With this Award the struggle came to an end. The 
garrison of Kenilworth held out indeed till November, 
and the full benefit of the Ban was only secured when 
Earl Gilbert in the opening of the following year sud- 
denly appeared in arms and occupied London. But the 
Earl was satisfied, the Disinherited were at last driven 
from Ely, and Llewelyn was brought to submission by 
the appearance of an army at Shrewsbury. All was over 
by the close of 1267. His father’s age and weakness, his 
own brilliant military successes, left Edward practically in 
possession of the royal power; and his influence at once 
made itself felt. There was no attempt to return to the 
misrule of Henry’s reign, to his projects of continental 
aggrandizement or internal despotism. The constitu- 
tional system of government for which the Barons had 
fought was finally adopted by the Crown, and the Parla- 
ment of Marlborough which assembled in November, 
1267, renewed the provisions by which the baronage had 
remedied the chief abuses of the time in their Provisions 
of Oxford and Westminster. The appointment of all 
officers of state indeed was jealously reserved to the 
crown. But the royal expenditure was brought within 
bounds. Taxation was only imposed with the assent of 


296 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the Great Council. So utterly was the land at rest that 
Edward felt himself free to take the cross in 1268, and to 
join the Crusade which was being undertaken by St. 
Lewis of France. He reached Tunis only to find Lewis 
dead and his enterprise a failure, wintered in Sicily, 
made his way to Acre in the spring of 1271, and spent 
more than a year in exploits which want of force pre- 
vented from growing into a serious campaign. He was 
already on his way home when the death of Henry the 
Third, in November, 1272, called him to the throne. 


CHAPTER IV. 
EDWARD THE FIRST. 
1272-1307. 


In his own day and among his own subjects Edward 
the First was the object of an almost boundless admira- 
tion. He was in the truest sense a national King. At 
the moment when the last trace of foreign conquest 
passed away, when the descendants of those who won 
and those who lost at Senlac blended forever into an 
English people, England saw in her ruler no stranger 
but an Englishman. ‘The national tradition returned in 
more than the golden hair or the English name which 
linked him to our earlier Kings. Edward’s very temper 
was English to the core. In good as in evil he stands 
out as the typical representative of the race he ruled, 
like them wilful and imperious, tenacious of his rights, 
indomitable in his pride, dogged, stubborn, slow of 
apprehension, narrow in sympathy, but like them, too, 
just in the main, unselfish, laborious, conscientious, 
haughtily observant of truth and self-respect, temperate, 
reverent of duty, religious. It is this oneness with the 
character of his people which parts the temper of Edward 
from what had till now been the temper of his house. 
He inherited indeed from the Angevins their fierce and 
passionate wrath; his punishments, when he punished 
in anger, were without pity; and a priest who ventured 
at a moment of storm into his presence with a remon- 
strance, dropped dead from sheer fright at his feet. But 
his nature had nothing of the hard selfishness, the 
vindictive obstinacy which had so long characterized the 
house of Anjou. His wrath passed as quickly as it 


gathered ; and for the most part his conduct was that of 
(297) 


298 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


an impulsive, generous man, trustful, averse from cruelty, 
prone to forgive. ‘No man ever asked mercy of me,” he 
said in his old age, “and was refused.” The rough 
soldierly nobleness of his nature broke out in incidents 
like that at Falkirk, where he lay on the bare ground 
among his men, or in his refusal during a Welsh campaign 
to drink of the one cask of wine which had been saved 
from marauders. ‘It is I who have brought you into 
this strait,” he said to his thirsty fellow-soldiers, “and I 
will have no advantage of you in meat or drink.” 
Beneath the stern imperiousness of his outer bearing lay 
in fact a strange tenderness and sensitiveness to affection. 
Every subject throughout his realm was drawn closer to 
the King, who wept bitterly at the news of his father’s 
death, though it gave hima crown, whose fiercest burst of 
vengeance was called out by an insult to his mother, 
whose crosses rose as memorials of his love and sorrow 
at every spot where his wife’s bier rested. ‘I loved her 
tenderly in her lifetime,’ wrote Edward to Eleanor’s 
friend, the Abbot of Clugny; “Ido not cease to love 
her now she is dead.” And as it was with mother and 
wife, so it was with his people at large. All the self- 
concentrated isolation of the foreign Kings disappeared 
in Edward. He was the first English ruler since the 
Conquest who loved his people with a personal love and 
craved for their love back again. To his trust in them 
we owe our Parliament, to his care for them the great 
statutes which standin the forefront of our laws. Even 
in his struggles with her England understood a temper 
which was so perfectly her own, and the quarrels between 
King and people during his reign are quarrels where, 
doggedly as they fought, neither disputant doubted fora 
moment the worth or affection of the other. Few scenes 
in our history are more touching than a scene during the 
long contest over the Charter, when Edward stood face 
to face with his people in Westminster Hall, and with a 
sudden burst of tears owned himself frankly in the 
wrong. 

But it was just this sensitiveness, this openness to 
xuter impressions and outer influences, that led to the 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 299 


strange contradictions which meet us in Edward’s career. 
His reign was a time in which a foreign influence told 
strongly on our manners, our literature, our national 
spirit, for the sudden rise of France into a compact and 
organized monarchy was now making its influence dom- 
inant in Western Europe. The “chivalry” so familar 
to us in the pages of Froissart, that picturesque mimicry 
of high sentiment, of heroism, love, and courtesy before 
which all depth and reality of nobleness disappeared to 
make room for the coarsest profligacy, the narrowest 
caste-spirit, and a brutal indifference to human suffering, 
was specially of French creation. ‘There was a noble- 
ness in Edward’s nature from which the baser influences 
of this chivalry fell away. His life was pure, his piety, 
save when it stooped to the superstition of the time, 
manly and sincere, while his high sense of duty saved 
him from the frivolous self-indulgence of his successors. 
But he was far from being wholly free from the taint of 
his age. His passionate desire was to be a model of the 
fashionable chivalr y of his day. His frame was that of 
a born soldier—tall, deep-chested, long of limb, capable 
alike of endurance or action, and he shared to the full 
his people’s love of venture and hard fighting. When 
he encountered Adam Gurdon after Evesham he forced 
him single-handed to beg for mercy. At the opening of 
his reign he saved his life by sheer fighting in a tourna- 
ment at Challon. It was this love of adventure which 
lent itself to the frivolous unreality of the new chivalry 
His fame as a general seemed a small thing to Edward 
when compared with his fame as a knight. At his 
“Round Table of Kenilworth” a hundred lords and 
ladies, “clad all in silk,” renewed the faded glories of 
Arthur’s Court. The false air of romance which was 
soon to turn the gravest political resolutions into out- 
bursts of sentimental feeling appeared in his ‘“ Vow of 
the Swan,” when rising at the royal board he swore on 
the dish before him to avenge on Scotland the murder of 
Comyn. Chivalry exerted on him a yet more fatal in- 
fluence in its narrowing of his sympathy to the noble 
class and in its exclusion of the peasant and the crafts- 


300 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


man from all claim topity. ‘ Knight without reproach ” 
as he was, he looked calmly on at the massacre of the 
burghers of Berwick, and saw in William Wallace noth- 
ing but a common robber. 

The French notion of chivalry had hardly more power 
over Edward’s mind than the French conception of king- 
ship, feudality, and law. The rise of a lawyer class was 
everywhere hardening customary into written rights, 
allegiance into subjection, loose ties such as commenda- 
tion into a definite vassalage. But it was specially 
through French influence, the influence of St. Lewis and 
his successors, that the imperial theories of the Roman 
Law were brought to bear upon this natural tendency of 
the time. When the “sacred majesty” of the Cesars 
was transferred by a legal fiction to the royal head of a 
feudal baronage,every constitutional relation was changed. 
The “ defiance” by which a vassal renounced service to 
his lord became treason, his after resistance “ sacrilege.” 
That Edward could appreciate what was sound and 
noble in the legal spirit around him was shown in his 
reforms of our judicature and our Parliament; but there 
was something as congenial to his mind in its definite- 
ness, its rigidity, its narrow technicalities. He was never 
wilfully unjust, but he was too often captious in his — 
justice, fond of legal chicanery, prompt to take advantage 
of the letter of the law. The high conception of royalty 
which he borrowed from St. Lewis united with this legal 
turn of mind in the worst acts of his reign. Ofrights or 
liberties unregistered in charter or roll Edward would 
know nothing, while his own good sense was overpowered 
by the majesty of his crown. It was incredible to him 
that Scotland should revolt against a legal bargain which 
made her national independence conditional on the terms 
extorted from a claimant of her throne; nor could he 
view in any other light but as treason the resistance of 
his own baronage to an arbitrary taxation which their 
fathers had borne. | 

It is in the anomalies of such a character as this, in its 
strange mingling of justice and wrong-doing, of grandeur 
and littleness, that we must look for any fair explanation 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 301 


of much that has since been bitterly blamed in Edward’s 
conduct and policy. But what none of these anomalies 
can hide from us is the height of moral temper which 
shows itself in the tenor of his rule. Edward was 
every inch a king; but his notion of kingship was a lofty 
and anoble one. He loved power; he believed in his 
sovereign rights and clung to them with a stubborn te- 
nacity. But his main end in clinging to them was the 
welfare of his people. Nothing better proves the self- 
command which he drew from the purpose he set before » 
him than his freedom from the common sin of great rulers 

—the lust of military glory. He was the first of our 

kings since William the Conqueror who combined mil- 

itary genius with political capacity ; but of the warrior’s 

temper, of the temper that finds delight in war, he had 

little or none. His freedom from it was the more remark- 

able that Edward was a great soldier. His strategy in 

the campaign before Evesham marked him as a consum- 

mate general. Earl Simon was forced to admire the skill 

of his advance on the fatal field, and the operations by 

which he met the risings that followed it were a model of 
rapidity and military grasp. In his Welsh campaigns he 

was soon to show a tenacity and force of will which 

wrested victory out of the midst of defeat. He could 

head a furious charge of horse as at Lewes, or organize a 

commissariat which enabled him to move army after army 

across the harried Lowlands. In his old age he was 

quick to discover the value of the English archery and 

to employ it as a means of victory at Falkirk. But mas- 

ter as he was of the art of war, and forced from time to 

time to show his mastery in great campaigns, in no single 

instance was he the assailant. He fought only when he 

was forced to fight; and when fighting was over he 

turned back quietly to the work of administration and 

the making of laws. 

War in fact was with Edward simply a means of carry- 
ing out the ends of statesmanship, and it was in the 
character of his statesmanship that his real greatness made 
itself felt. His policy was an English policy; he was 
firm to retain what was left of the French dominion of 


302 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


his race, but he abandoned from the first all dreams of 
recovering the wider dominions which his grandfather 
had lost. His mind was not on that side of the Channel, 
but on this. He concentrated his energies on the consol- 
idation and good government of England itself. We can 
only fairly judge the annexation of Wales or his attempt 
to annex Scotland if we look on his efforts in either 
quarter as parts of the same scheme of national adminis- 
tration to which we owe his final establishment of our 
judicature, our legislation, our parliament. The charac- 
ter of his action was no doubt determined in great part 
by the general mood of his age, an age whose special task 
and aim seemed to be that of reducing to distinet form 
the principles which had sprung into a new and vigorous 
life during the age which preceded it. As the opening 
of the thirteenth century had been an age of founders, 
creators, discoverers, so its close was an age of lawyers, 
of rulers such as St. Lewis of France or Alfonzo the Wise 
of Castille, organizers, administrators, framers of laws and 
institutions. It was to this class that Edward himself 
belonged. He had little of creative genius, of political 
originality, but he possessed in a high degree the passion 
for order and good government, the faculty of organiza- 
tion, and a love of law which broke out even in the legal 
chicanery to which he sometimes stooped. In the judi- 
cial reforms to which so much of his attention was di- 
rected he showed himself, if not an “ English Justinian,” 
at any rate a clear-sighted and judicious man of business, 
developing, reforming, bringing into a shape which has 
borne the test of five centuries’ experience the institutions 
of his predecessors. If the excellence of a statesman’s 
work is to be measured by its duration and the faculty it 
has shown of adapting itself to the growth and develop- 
ment of a nation, then the work of Edward rises to the 
highest standard of excellence. Our law courts preserve 
to this very day the form which he gave them. Mighty 
as has been the growth of our Parliament, it has grown 
on the lines which he laid down. The great roll of Eng- 
lish Statutes reaches back in unbroken series to the 
Statutes of Edward. The routine of the first Henry, the 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 3038 


administrative changes which had been imposed on the 
nation by the clear head and imperious will of the second, 
were transformed under Edward into a political organiza- 
tion with carefully-defined limits, directed not by the 
King’s will alone but by the political impulse of the 
people at large. His social legislation was based in the 
same fashion on principles which had already been brought 
into practical working by Henry the Second. It was no 
doubt in great measure owing to this practical sense of 
its financial and administrative value rather than to any 
foresight of its political importance that we owe Edward's 
organization of our Parliament. But if the institutions 
which we commonly associate with his name owe their 
origin to others, they owe their form and their perpetuity 
to him. 

The King’s English policy, like his English name, was 
in fact the sign of a new epoch. England was made. 
The long period of national formation had come practi- 
eally to an end. With the reign of Edward begins the 
constitutional England in which we live. It is not that 
any chasm separates our history before it from our bis- 
tory after it as the chasm of the Revolution divides the 
history of France, for we have traced the rudiments of 
our constitution to the first moment of the English set- 
tlement in Britain. But it is with these as with our 
language. The tongue of A‘lfred is the very tongue we 
speak, but in spite of its identity with modern English it 
has to be learned like the tongue of a stranger. On the 
other hand, the English of Chaucer is almost as intel- 
ligible as our own. In the first the historian and phi- 
lologer can study the origin and development of our 
national speech, in the last a school-boy can enjoy the 
story of Troilus and Cressida or listen to the gay chat of 
the Canterbury Pilgrims. In precisely the same way a 
knowledge of our earliest laws is indispensable for the 
right understanding of later legislation, its origin and 
its development, while principles of our Parliamentary 
system must necessarily be studied in the meétings of 
Wise Men before the Conquest or the Great Council of 
_barens after it. But the Parliaments which Edward 


304 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


gathered at the close of his reign are not merely illustra- 
tive of the history of later Parliaments, they are abso- 
lutely identical with those which still sit at St. Stephen’s. 
At the close of his reign King, Lords, Commons, the 
Courts of Justice, the forms of public administration, the 
relations of Church and State, all local divisions and pro- 
vincial jurisdictions, in great measure the framework of 
society itself, have taken the shape which they essentially 
retain. Ina word the long struggle of the constitution 
for actual existence has come to an end. The contests 
which follow are not contests that tell, like those that 
preceded them, on the actual fabric of our institutions ; 
they are simply stages in the rough discipline by which 
England has learned and is still learning how best to use 
and how wisely to develope the latent powers of its na- 
tional life, how to adjust the balance of its social and 
political forces, how to adapt its constitutional forms to 
the varying conditions of the time. 

The news of his father’s death found Edward at Capua 
in the opening of 1273; but the quiet of his realm under a 
regency of which Roger Mortimer was the practical head 
left him free to move slowly homewards. Two of his 
acts while thus journeying through Italy show that his 
mind was already dwelling on the state of English 
finance and of English law. His visit to the Pope at 
Orvieto was with a view of gaining permission to levy 
from the clergy a tenth of their income for the three 
coming years, while he drew from Bologna its most em- 
inent jurist, Francesco Accursi, to aid in the task of legal 
reform. At Paris he did homage to Philip the Third for 
his French possessions, and then turning southward he 
devoted a year to the ordering of Gascony. It was not 
till the summer of 1274 that the King reached England. 
But he had already planned the work he had to do, and 
the measures which he laid before the Parliament of 1275 
were signs of the spirit in which he was to set about it. 
The First Statute of Westminster was rather a code than 
a statute. It contained no less than fifty-one clauses, 
and was an attempt to summarize a number of previous 
enactments contained in the Great Charter, the Pro- 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 805 


visions of Oxford, and the Statute of Marlborough, as well 
as to embody some of the administrative measures of 
Henry the Second and his son. But a more pressing 
need than that of a codification of the law was the need 
of a reorganization of finance. While the necessities of 
the Crown was growing with the widening of its range 
of administrative action, the revenues of the Crown ad- 
mitted of no corresponding expansion. In the earliest 
times of our history the outgoings of the Crown were as 
small as its income. All local expenses, whether for - 
justice or road-making or fortress-building, were paid by 
local funds ; and the national “ fyrd” served at its own 
cost in the field. The produce of a king’s private estates 
with the provisions due to him from the public lands 
scattered over each county, whether gathered by the 
King himself as he moved over his realm, or as in later 
days fixed at a stated rate and collected by his sheriff, 
were sufficient to defray the mere expenses of the Court. 
The Danish wars gave the first shock to this simple 
‘system. To raise a ransom which freed the land from 
the invader, the first land-tax, under the name of the 
Danegeld, was laid on every hide of ground ; and to this 
national taxation the Norman kings added the feudal 
burdens of the new military estates created by the Con- 
quest, reliefs paid on inheritance, profits of marriages and 
wardship, and the three feudal aids. But foreign warfare 
soon exhausted this means of revenue; the barons and 
bishops in their Great Council were called on at each 
emergency for a grant from their lands, and at each grant 
a corresponding demand was made by the King as a 
landlord on the towns, as lying for the most part in the 
royal demesne. The cessation of Danegeld under Henry 
the Second and his levy of scutage made little change in 
the general incidence of taxation ; it still fell wholly on 
the land, for even the townsmen paid as holders of their 
tenements. But a new principle of taxation was dis- 
closed in the tithe levied for a Crusade at the close of 
Henry’s reign. Land was no longer the only source of 
wealth. The growth of national prosperity, of trade 
and commerce, was creating a mass of personal property 


306 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


which offered irresistible temptations to the Angevin 
financiers. The old revenue from landed property was 
restricted and lessened by usage and compositions. Scut- 
age was only due for foreign campaigns: the feudal aids 
only on rare and stated occasions: and though the fines 
from the shire-courts grew with the growth of society 
the dues from the public lands were fixed and incapable 
of development. But no usage fettered the Crown in 
dealing with personal property, and its growth in value 
promised a growing revenue. From the close of Henry 
the Second’s reign therefore this became the most com- 
mon form of taxation. Grants of from a seventh to 
a thirtieth of movables, household-property, and stock 
were demanded ; and it was the necessity of procuring 
their assent to these demands which enabled the baron- 
age through the reign of Henry the Third to bring a 
financial pressure to bear on the Crown. 

But in addition to these two forms of direct taxation 
indirect taxation also was coming more and more to the 
front. ‘The right of the King to grant licences to bring 
goods into or to trade within the realm, a right springing 
from the need for his protection felt by the strangers who 
came there for purposes of traffic, laid the foundation of 
our taxes on imports. ‘Those on exports were only apart 
of the general system of taxing personal property which 
we have already noticed. How tempting this source of 
revenue was proving we see froma provision of the Great 
Charter which forbids the levy of more than the ancient 
customs on merchants entering or leaving the realm. 
Commerce was in fact growing with the growing wealth 
ofthe people. The crowd of civil and ecclesiastical build- 
ings which date from this period shows the prosperity of 
the country. Christian architecture reached its highest 
beauty in the opening of Edward’s reign ; a reign marked 
by the completion of the abbey church of Westminster 
and of the cathedral church at Salisbury. An English 
noble was proud to be styled “an incomparable builder,” 
while some traces of the art which was rising into life 
across the Alps flowed in, it may be, with the Italian 
ecclesiastics whom the Papacy forced on the English 


THE CHARTER. 1204—-1291. 307 


Church. The shrine of the Confessor at Westminster, 
the mosaic pavement beside the altar of the abbey, the 
paintings on the walls of its chapter-house remind us of 
the schools which were springing up under Giotto and 
the Pisans. But the wealth which this art progress 
shows drew trade to English shores. England was as 
yet simply an agricultural country. Gascony sent her 
wines ; her linens were furnished by the looms of Ghent 
and Liége ; Genoese vessels brought to her fairs the silks, 
the velvets, the glass of Italy. In the barks of the Hanse 
merchants came fur and amber from the Baltic, herrings, 
pitch, timber, and naval stores from the countries of the 
north. Spain sent us iron and war-horses. Milan sent 
armor. The great Venetian merchant-galleys touched 
the southern coasts and left in our ports the dates of 
Egypt, the figs and currants of Greece, the silk of Sicily, 
the sugar of Cyprus and Crete, the spices of the Eastern 
seas. Capital too came from abroad. The bankers of 
Florence and Lucca were busy with loans to the court 
or vast contracts with the wool-growers. ‘The bankers 
of Cahors had already dealt a death-blow to the usury 
of the Jew. Against all this England had few exports 
to set. The lead supplied by the mines of Derbyshire, 
the salt of the Worcestershire springs, the iron of the 
Weald, were almost wholly consumed at home. The 
one metal export of any worth was that of tin iron from 
the tin mines of Cornwall. But the production of wool 
was fast becoming a main element of the nation’s wealth. 
Flanders, the great manufacturing country of the time, 
lay fronting our eastern coast; and with this market 
close at hand the pastures of England found more and 
more profit in the supply of wool. The Cistercian order 
which possessed vast ranges of moorland in Yorkshire be- 
came famous as wool-growers; and their wool had been 
seized for Richard’s ransom. ‘The Florentine merchants 
were developing this trade by their immense contracts ; 
we find a single company of merchants contracting for 
the purchase of the Cistercian wool throughout the year. 
It was after counsel with the Italian bankers that Ed- 
ward devised his scheme for drawing a permanent revenue 


308 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


from this source. In the Parliament of 1275 he obtained 
the grant of half a mark, or six shillings and eightpence, 
on each sack of wool exported; and this grant, a grant 
memorable as forming the first legal foundation of our 
customs-revenue, at once relieved the necessities of the 
Crown. 

The grant of the wool tax enabled Edward in fact to 
deal with the great difficulty of his realm. The troubles 
of the Barons’ war, the need which Earl Simon felt of 
Llewelyn’s alliance to hold in check the Marcher-barons, 
had all but shaken off from Wales the last traces of de-. 
pendence. Even at theclose of the war the threat of an at- 
tack from the now united kingdom only forced Llewelyn 
to submission on a practical acknowledgment of his 
sovereignty. Although the title which Llewelyn ap 
Jorwerth claimed of Prince of North Wales was recog- 
nized by the English court in the earlier days of Henry | 
the ‘Third, it was withdrawn after 1229 and its claimant 
known only as Prince of Aberffraw. But the loftier title - 
of Princeof Wales which Llewelyn ap Gryffydd assumed 
in 1256 was formally conceded to him in 1267, and his 
right to receive homage from the other nobles of his 
principality was formally sanctioned. Near however as 
he seemed to the final realization of his aims, Llewelyn 
was still a vassal of the English crown, and the accession 
of Idward to the throne was at once followed by the de- 
mand of homage. But the summons was fruitless; and 
the next two years were wasted in as fruitless negotia- 
tion. The kingdom however was now well in hand. 
The royal treasury was filled again, and in 1277 Edward 
marched on North Wales. The fabric of Welsh great- 
ness fell at a single blow. The chieftains who had so 
lately sworn fealty to Llewelyn in the southern and cen- 
tral parts of the country deserted him to join his Eng- 
lish enemies in their attack; an English fleet reduced 
Anglesea ; and the Prince was cooped up in his mountain 
fastnesses and forced to throw himself on Edward’s mercy. — 
With characteristic moderation the conqueror contented 
himself with adding to the English dominions the coast- 
district as far as Conway and with providing that the 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 209 


title of Prince of Wales should cease at Llewelyn’s death. 
A heavy fine which he had ineurred by his refusal to do 
homage was remitted; and Eleanor, a daughter of Earl 
Simon of Montfort whom he had sought as his wife but 
who had heen arrested on her way to him, was wedded to 
the Prince at Edward’s court. 

For four years all was quiet across the Welsh Marches, 
_ and Edward was able again to turn his attention to the 
work of internal reconstruction. It is probably to this 
time, certainly to the earlier years of his reign, that we 
may attribute his modification of our judicial system. 
The King’s Court was divided into three distinct tribunals, 
the Court of Exchequer which took cognizance of all 
causes in which the royal revenue was concerned ; the 
Court of Common Pleas for suits between private per- 
sons; and the King’s Bench, which had jurisdiction in 
all matters that affected the sovereign as well as in “ pleas 
of the crown” or criminal causes expressly reserved for 
his decision. Each court was now provided with a dis- 
tinct staff of judges. Of yet greater importance than 
this change, which was in effect but the completion of a 
process of severance that bad long been going on, was 
the establishment of an equitable jurisdiction side by side 
with that of the common law. In his reform of 1178 
Henry the Second broke up the older King’s Court, which 
had till then served as the final Court of Appeal, by the 
severance of the purely legal judges who had been grad- 
ually added to it from the general body of his councillors. 
The judges thus severed from the Council retained the 
name and the ordinary jurisdiction of ** the King’s Court,” 
but the mere fact of their severance changed in an essen- 
tial way the character of the justice they dispensed. The 
King in Council wielded a power which was not only 
judicial but executive; his decisions though based upon 
custom were not fettered by it, they were the expressions 
of his will, and it was as his will that they were carried 
- out by officers of the Crown. But the separate bench of 
judges had no longer this unlimited power at their com- 
mand. They had not the King’s right as representative 
of the community to make the law for the redress of a 


510 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


wrong. ‘They professed simply to declare what the ex- 
isting law was, even if it was insufficient for the full pur- 
pose of redress. The authority of their decision rested 
mainly on their adhesion to ancient custom or as it was 
styled the “common law” which had grown up in the 
past. They could enforce their decisions only by direc- 
tions to an independent officer, the sheriff, and here again 
their right was soon rigidly bounded by set form ‘and 
custom. These bonds in fact became tighter every day, 
for their decisions were now beginning to be reported, and 
the cases decided by one bench of judges became authori- 
ties for their successors. It is plain that such a state 
of things has the utmost value in many ways, whether in 
creating in men’s minds that impersonal notion of a sov- 
ereign law which exercises its imaginative force on human 
action, or in .furnishing by the accumulation and sacred- 
ness of precedents a barrier against the invasion of arbi- 
trary power. Butit threw a terrible obstacle in the way 
of the actual redress of wrong. Theincreasing complexity 
of human action as civilization advanced outstripped the 
efforts of the law. Sometimes ancient custom furnished 
no redress for a wrong which sprang from modern circum- 
stances. Sometimes the very pedantry and inflexibility 
of the law itself became in individual cases the highest 
injustice. 

It was the consciousness of this that made men cling 
even from the first moment of the independent existence 
of these courts to the judicial power which still remained 
inherent in the Crown itself. If his courts fell short in 
any matter the duty of the King to do justice to all still 
remained, and it was this obligation which was recog- 
nized in the provision of Henry the Second by which all 
cases in which his judges failed to do justice were re- 
served for the special cognizance of the royal Council 
itself. To this final jurisdiction of the King in Council | 
Edward gave a wide development. His assembly of the 
ministers, the higher permanent officials, and the law 
officers of the Crown for the first time reserved to itself 
in its judicial capacity the correction of all breaches of 
the law which the lower courts had failed to repress, 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. Old 


whether from weakness, partiality, or corruption, and 
especially of those lawless outbreaks of the more power- 
_ ful baronage which defied the common authority of the 
judges. Such powers were of course capable of terrible 
abuse, and it shows what real need there was felt to be 
for their exercise that though regarded with jealousy by 
Parliament the jurisdiction of the royal Council appears 
to have been steadily put into force through the two 
centuries which followed. In the reign of Henry the 
Seventh it took legal and statutory form in the shape of. 
the Court of Star Chamber, and its powers are still ex- 
ercised in our own day by the Judicial Committee of the 
Privy Council. But the same duty of the Crown to do 
justice where its courts fell short of giving due redress 
for wrong expressed itself in the jurisdiction of the 
Chancellor. This great officer of State, who had perhaps 
originally acted only as President of the Council when 
discharging its judicial functions, acquired at a very 
early date an independent judicial position of the same 
nature. It is by remembering this origin of the Court of 
Chancery that we understand the nature of the powers 
it gradually acquired. All grievances of the subject, 
especially those which sprang from the misconduct of 
government officials or of powerful oppressors, fell within 
its cognizance as they fell within that of the Royal 
Council, and to these were added disputes respecting the 
wardship of infants, dower, rent-charges, or tithes. Its 
equitable jurisdiction sprang from the defective nature 
and the technical and unbending rules of the common 
law. As the Council had given redress in cases where 
law became injustice, so the Court of Chancery interfered 
without regard to the rules of procedure adopted by the 
common law courts on the petition of a party for whose 
grievance the common law provided no adequate remedy. 
An analogous extension of his powers enabled the Chan- 
cellor to afford relief in cases of fraud, accident, or abuse 
of trust, and this side of his jurisdiction was largely ex- 
tended at a later time by the results of legislation on the 
tenure of land by ecclesiastical bodies. The separate 
powers of the Chancellor, whatever was the original date 


312 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


at which they were first exercised, seem to have been 
thoroughly established under Edward the First. 

What reconciled the nation to the exercise of powers 
such as these by the Crown andits council was the need 
which was still to exist for centuries of an effective means 
of bringing the baronage within the reach of the law. 
Constitutionally the position of the English nobles had 
now become established. A King could no longer make 
laws or levy taxes or even make war without their assent. 
The nation reposed in them an unwavering trust, for 
they were no longer the brutal foreigners from whose 
violence the strong hand of a Norman ruler had been 
needed to protect his subjects ; they were as English as 
the peasant or the trader. They had won English liberty 
by their swords, and the tradition of their order bound 
them to look on themselves as its natural guardians. The 
close of the Barons’ War solved the problem which had 
so long troubled the realm, the problem how to ensure the 
government of the realm in accordance with the provisions _ 
of the Great Charter, by the transfer of the business of 
administration into the hands of a standing committee 
of the greater barons and prelates, acting as chief officers 
of state in conjunction with specially appointed ministers 
of the Crown. The body thus composed was known as 
the Continual Council; and the quiet government of the 
kinedom by this body in the long interval between the 
death of Henry the Third and his son’s return shows 
how effective this rule of the nobles was. It is signifi- 
cant of the new relation which they were to strive to 
establish between themselves and the Crown that in the 
brief which announced Edward’s accession the Council 
asserted that the new monarch mounted his throne * by 
the will of the peers.” But while the political influence 
of the baronage as a leading element in the whole nation 
thus steadily mounted, the personal and purely feudal 
power of each individual baron on his own estates as 
steadily fell. The hold which the Crown gained on 
every noble family by its rights of wardship and marriage, 
the circuits of the royal judges, the ever narrowing 
bounds within which baronial justice saw itself cireum- 


THE CHARTER. 120 1—1291. 813 


scribed, the blow dealt by scutage at their military power, 
the prompt intervention of the Council in their feuds, 
lowered the nobles more and more to the common level 
of their fellow subjects. Much yet remained to be done, 
for within the general body of the baronage there existed 
side by side with the nobles whose aims were purely na- 
tional nobles who saw in the overthrow of the royal 
despotism simply a chance of setting up again their feu- 
dal privileges; and different as the English baronage, 
taken as a whole, was from a feudal nodlesse like that of 
Germany or France there is in every military class a 
natural drift towards violence and lawlessness. Through- 
out Edward’s reign his strong hand was needed to enforce 
order on warring nobles. Great earls, such as those of 
Gloucester and Hereford, carried on private war; in 
Shropshire the Earl of Arundel waged his feud with 
Fulk Fitz Warine. To the lesser and poorer nobles the 
wealth of the trader, the long train of goods as it 
passed along the highway, remained a tempting prey. 
Once, under cover of a mock tournament of monks 
against canons, a band of country gentlemen succeeded 
in introducing themselves into the great merchant fair 
at Boston, at nightfall every booth was on fire, the 
merchants robbed and slaughtered, and the booty car- 
ried off to ships which lay ready at the quay. Streams 
of gold and silver, ran the tale of popular horror, 
flowed melted down the gutters to the sea; “all the 
money in England could hardly make good the loss.” 
Even at the close of Edward’s reign lawless bands of 
* trail-bastons,” or club-men, maintained themselves by 
general outrage, aided the country nobles in their feuds, 
and wrested money and goods from the great trades- 
men. 

The King was strong enough to face and imprison the 
warring earls, to hang the chiefs of the Boston maraud- 
ers, and to suppress the outlaws by rigorous commis- 
sions. But the repression of baronial outrage was only 
a part of Edward’s policy in relation to the Baronage. 
Here, as elsewhere he had to carry out the political 
policy of his house, a policy defined by the great meas- 


$14 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


ures of Henry the Second, his institution of scutage, his 
general assize of arms, his extension of the itinerant 
judicature of the royal judges. Forced by the first to an 
exavt discharge of their military duties to the Crown, set 
by the second in the midst of a people trained equally 
with the nobles to arms, their judicial tyranny curbed 
and subjected to the King’s justice by the third, the 
barons had been forced from their old standpoint of an 
isolaved class to the new and nobler position of a people's 
leaders. Edward watched jealously over the ground 
which the Crown had gained. Immediately after his 
landing he appointed a commission of inquiry into the 
judicial franchises then existing, and on its report (of 
which the existing ‘ Hundred-Rolls” are the result) 
itinerant justices were sent in 1278 to discover by what 
rigbt these franchises were held. The writs of “quo 
warranto” were roughly met here and there. Earl 
Warenne bared a rusty sword and flung it on the jus- 
tices’ table. ‘ This, sirs,” he said, “is my warrant. By 
the sword our fathers won their lands when they came 
over with the Conqueror, and by the sword we will keep 
them.” But the King was far from limiting himself to 
the mere carrying out of the plans of Henry the Second. 
Henry had aimed simply at lowering the power of the 
great feudatories; Edward aimed rather at neutralizing 
their power by raising the whole body of landowners to 
the same level. We shall see at a later time the meas- 
ures which were the issues of this policy, but in the very 
opening of his reign a significant step pointed to the 
King’s drift. In the summer of 1278 a royal writ ordered 
all freeholders who held lands to the value of twenty 
pounds to receive knighthood at the King’s hands. 

Acts as significant announced Edward’s purpose of 
carrying out another side of Henry’s policy, that of 
limiting in the same way the independent jurisdiction 
of the Church. He was resolute to force it to become 
thoroughly national by bearing its due part of the com- 
mon national burdens, and to break its growing depend- 
ence upon Rome. But the ecclesiastical body was jeal- 
ous of its position as a power distinct from the power of 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 315 


the Crown, and Edward’s policy had hardly declared 
‘itself when in 1279 Archbishop Peckham obtained a 
eanon from the clergy by which copies of the Great 
Charter, with its provisions in favor of the liberties of 
the Church, were to be affixed to the doors of churches. 
The step was meant as a defiant protest against all inter- 
ference, and it was promptly forbidden. An order issued 
by the Primate to the clergy to declare to their flocks 
the sentences of excommunication directed against all 
who obtained royal writs to obstruct suits in church 
courts, or who, whether royal officers or no, neglected 
to enforce their sentences, was answered in a yet more 
emphatic way. By falling into the “dead hand” or 
*“mortmain” of the Church land ceased to render its 
feudal services ; and in 1279 the Statute “de Religiosis,” 
or as it is commonly called “ of Mortmain,” forbade any 
further alienation of land to religious bodies in such 
wise that it should cease to render its due service to the 
King. ‘The restriction was probably no beneficial one to 
the country at large, for Churchmen were the best land- 
lords, and it was soon evaded by the ingenuity of the 
clerical lawyers; but it marked the growing jealousy of 
any attempt to set aside what was national from serving 
the general need and profit of the nation. Its immediate 
effect was to stir the clergy to a bitter resentment. But 
Edward remained firm, and when the bishops proposed 
to restrict the royal courts from dealing with cases of 
patronage or causes which touched the chattels of 
Churchmen he met their proposals by an instant pro- 
hibition. 

The resentment of the clergy had soon the means of 
showing itself during a new struggle with Wales. The 
persuasions of his brother David, who had deserted him 
in the previous war, but who deemed his desertion in- 
sufficiently rewarded by an English lordship, roused 
Llewelyn to a fresh revolt. A prophecy of Merlin was 
said to promise that when English money became round 
a Prince of Wales should be crowned in London; and 
at this moment a new coinage of copper money, coupled 
with a prolubition to break the silver penny into halves 


316 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


and quarters, as had been commonly done, was supposed 
to fulfil the prediction. In 1282 Edward marched in* 
overpowering strength into the heart of Wales. But 
Llewelyn held out in Snowdon with the stubbornness of 
despair, and the rout of an English force which had 
crossed into Anglesea prolonged the contest into the 
winter. The cost of the war fell on the King’s treasury. 
Edward had called for but one general grant through the 
past eight years of his reign; but he was now forced to 
appeal to his people, and by an expedient hitherto with-. 
out precedent two provincial Councils were called for 
this purpose. That for Southern England met at North- 
ampton, that for Northern at York ; and clergy and laity 
were summoned, though in separate session, to both. 
Two knights came from every shire, two burgesses from 
every borough, while the bishops brought their arch- 
deacons, abbots, and the proctors of their cathedral 
clergy. The grant of the laity was quick and liberal. 
But both at York and Northampton the clergy showed 
their grudge at Edward’s measures by long delays in 
supplying his treasury. Pinched however as were his 
resources, and terrible as were the sufferings of his army 
through the winter, Edward’s firmness remained un- 
broken; and rejecting all suggestions of retreat he is- 
sued orders for the formation of a: new army at Caer- 
marthen to complete the circle of investment round 
Llewelyn. But the war came suddenly to an end. The 
Prince sallied from his mountain hold for a raid upon 
Radnorshire and fell in a petty skirmish on the banks of 
the Wye. With him died the independence of his race. 
After six months of flight his brother David was made 
prisoner; and a Parliament summoned at Shrewsbury in 
the autumn of 1283, to which each county again sent its 
two knights and twenty boroughs their two burgesses. 
sentenced him to a traitor’s death. The submission of 
the lesser chieftains soon followed: and the country was 
secured by the building of strong castles at Conway and 
Caernarvon, and the settlement of English barons on the 
confiscated soil. The Statute of Wales which Edward 
promulgated at Rhuddlan in 1284 proposed to introduce 


HE CHARTER, 1204—1291. 817 


English law and the English administration of justice 
and government into Wales. But little came of the 
attempt; and it was not till the time of Henry the 
Highth that the country was actually incorporated with 
England and represented in the English Parliament. 
What Edward had really done was to break the Welsh 
resistance. The policy with which he followed up his 
victory (for the “ massacre of the bards” is a mere fable) 
accomplished its end; and though two later rebellions 
and a ceaseless strife of the natives with the English 
towns in their midst showed that the country was still 
far from being reconciled to its conquest, it ceased to be 
any serious danger to England for a hundred years. 
From the work of conquest Edward again turned to 
the work of legislation. In the midst of his struggle 
with Wales he had shown his care for the commercial 
classes by a Statute of Merchants in 1283, which pro- 
vided for the registration of the debts of traders and for 
their recovery by distraint of the debtor’s goods and the 
imprisonment of his person. The close of the war saw 
two measures of even greater importance. The second 
Statute of Westminster which appeared in 1285 is a code 
of the same sort as the first, amending the Statutes of 
Mortmain, of Merton, and of Gloucester as well as the 
laws of dower and advowson, remodelling the system of 
justices of assize, and curbing the abuses of manorial 
jurisdiction. In the same year appeared the greatest of 
Edward’s measures for the enforcement of public order. 
The Statute of Winchester revived and reorganized the 
old institutions of national police and national defence. 
It regulated the action of the hundred, the duty of 
watch and ward, and the gathering of the fyrd or mili- 
tia of the realm as Henry the Second had moulded it 
into form in his Assize of Arms. Every man was bound 
to hold himself in readiness, duly armed, for the King’s 
service in case of invasion or revolt, and to pursue felons 
when hue and cry were made after them. Every district 
was held responsible for crimes committed within its 
bounds; the gates of each town were to be shut at 
nightfall , and all strangers were required to give an ac- 


318 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


count of themselves to the magistrates of any borough 
which they entered. By a provision which illustrates 
at once the social and physical condition of the country 
at the time, all brushwood was ordered to be destroyed 
within a space of two hundred feet on either side of the 
public highway as a security for travellers against sudden 
attacks from robbers. ‘To enforce the observance of this 
act knights were appointed in every shire under the name 
of Conservators of the Peace, a name which as the benefit 
of these local magistrates was more sensibly felt and 
their powers were more largely extended was changed 
into that which they still retain of Justices of the Peace. 
So orderly however was the realm that Edward was able, 
in 1286, to pass over sea to his foreign dominions, and to 
spend the next three years in reforming their govern- 
ment. But the want of his guiding hand was at last 
felt: and the Parliament of 1289 refused a new tax till 
the King came home again. 

He returned to find the Earl of Gloucester and Here- 
ford at war, and his judges charged with violence and 
corruption. The two Earls were brought to peace, and 
Earl Gilbert allied closely to the royal house by a mar- 
riage with the King’s daughter Johanna. After a care- 
ful investigation the judicial abuses were recognized and 
amended. ‘Two of the chief justices were banished from 
the realm and their colleagues imprisoned and _ fined. 
But these administrative measures were only preludes to 
a great legislative act which appeared in 1290. The 
Third Statute of Westminster, or, to use the name by 
which it is more commonly known, the Statute “ Quia 
Emptores,” is one of those legislative efforts which mark 
the progress of a wide social revolution in the country at 
large. The number of the greater barons was diminish- 
ing every day, while the number of the country gentry 
and of the more substantial yeomanry was increasing 
with the increase of the national wealth. The increase 
showed itself in a growing desire to become proprietors 
of land. Tenants of the barons received under-tenants 
on condition of their rendering them similar services to 
those which they themselves rendered to their lords; 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 319 


and the baronage, while duly receiving the services in 
compensation for which they had originally granted their 
lands in fee, saw with jealousy the feudal profits of these 
new under-tenants, the profits of wardships or of reliefs 
and the like, in a word the whole increase in the value 
of the estate consequent on its subdivision and higher 
cultivation passing into other hands than their own. 
The purpose of the statute “‘Quia Emptores” was to 
check this process by providing that in any case of alien- 
ation the sub-tenant should henceforth hold, not of the 
tenant, but directly of the superior lord. But its result 
was to promote instead of hindering the transfer and 
subdivision of land. The tenant who was compelled 
before the passing of the statute to retain in any case so 
much of the estate as enabled him to discharge his feudal 
services to the overlord of whom he held it, was now 
enabled by a process analogous to the modern sale of 
“ tenant-right,” to transfer both land and services to new 
holders. However small the estates thus created might 
be, the bulk were held directly of the Crown; and this 
class of lesser gentry and freeholders grew steadily from 
this time in numbers and importance. 

The year which saw “Quia Emptores ” saw astep which 
remains the great blot upon Edward’s reign. The work 
abroad had exhausted the royal treasury, and he bought 
a grant from his Parliament by listening to their wishes 
in the matter of the Jews. Jewish traders had followed 
William the Conqueror from Normandy, and had been 
enabled by his protection to establish themselves in 
separate quarters or “Jewries” in all larger English 
towns. The Jew had no right or citizenship in the land. 
The Jewry in which he lived was exempt from the com- 
mon law. He was simply the King’s chattel, and his 
life and goods were at the King’s mercy. But he was 
too valuable a possession to be lightly thrown away. If 
the Jewish merchant had no standing-ground in the local 
court the king enabled him to sue before a special jus- 
ticiar ; his bonds were deposited for safety in a ‘chamber 
of the royal palace at Westminster; he was protected 
against the popular hatred in the free exercise of his re 


3290 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


ligion, and allowed to build synagogues and to manage 
his own ecclesiastical affairs by means of a chief rabbi. 
The royal protection was dictated by no spirit of toler- 
ance or mercy. To the kings the Jew was a mere engine 
of finance. The wealth which he accumulated was 
wrung from him whenever the crown. had need, and tor- 
ture and imprisonment were resorted to when milder 
means failed. It was the gold of the Jew that filled the 
royal treasury at the outbreak of war or of revolt. It 
was in the Hebrew coffers that the foreign kings found 
strength to hold their baronage at bay. 
That the presence of the Jew was, at least in the 
earlier years of his settlement, beneficial to the nation at 
large there can be little doubt. His arrival was the ar- 
rival of a capitalist; and heavy as was the usury he 
necessarily exacted in the general insecurity of the time, 
his loans gave an impulse to industry. The century 
which followed the Conquest witnessed an outburst of 
architectural energy which covered the land with castles 
and cathedrals; but castle and cathedral alike owed 
their erection to the loans of the Jew. His own example 
gave anew vigor to domestic architecture. The build- 
ings which as at Lincoln and Bury St. Edmund’s still 
retain their name of ‘“ Jews’ Houses,” were almost the 
first houses of stone which superseded the mere hovyels 
of the English burghers. Nor was their influence simply 
industrial. Through their connexion with the Jewish 
schools in Spain and the East they opened a way for 
the revival of physical sciences. A Jewish medical school 
seems to have existed at Oxford; Roger Bacon himself 
studied under English rabbis. But the general progress 
of civilization now drew little help from the Jew, while 
the coming of the Cahorsine and Italian bankers drove 
him from the field of commercial finance. He fell back on 
the petty usury of loans to the poor, a trade necessarily 
accompanied with much of extortion and which roused 
into fiercer life the religious hatred against their race. 
Wild stories floated about of children carried off to be 
circumcised or crucified, and a Lincoln boy who was 
found slain in a Jewish house was canonized by popular 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 321 


reverence as “St. Hugh.” The first work of the Friars 
was to settle in the Jewish quarters and attempt their 
conversion, but the popular fury rose too fast for these 
gentler means of reconciliation. When the Franciscans 
saved seventy Jews from hanging by their prayer to 
Henry the Third the populace angrily refused the breth- 
ren alms. 

But all this growing hate was met with a bold de- 
fiance. ‘The picture which is commonly drawn of the 


. Jew as timid, silent, crouching under oppression, how- 


ever truly it may represent the general position of his 
race throughout medizval Europe, is far from being borne 
out by historical fact on this side the Channel. In Eng- 
land the attitude of the Jew, almost to the very end, 
was an attitude of proud and even insolent defiance. 
He knew that the royal policy exempted him from the 
common taxation, the common Justice, the common obl- 
gations of Englishmen. Usurer, extortioneras the realm 
held him to be, the royal justice would secure him the 
repayment of his bonds. A royal commission visited 
with heavy penalties any outbreak of violence against 
the King’s “ chattels.” The Red King actually forbade 
the conversion of a Jew to the Christian faith; it was a 
poor exchange, he said, that would rid him of a valuable 
property and give him only a subject. We see insucha 
case as that of Oxford the insolence that grew out of this 
consciousness of the royal protection. Here as elsewhere 
the Jewry was a town within atown, with its own lan- 
guage, its own religion and law, its pecuhar commerce, 
its peculiar dress. No city bailiff could penetrate into 
the square of little alleys which lay behind the present 
Town Hall; the Church itself was powerless to prevent 
a synagogue from rising in haughty rivalry over against 
the cloister of St. Frideswide. Prior Philip of St. Frides- 
wide complains bitterly of a certain Hebrew who stood 
at his door as the procession of the saint passed by, mock- 
ing at the miracles which were said to be wrought at her 
shrine. Halting and then walking firmly on his feet, 
showing his hands clenched as if with palsy and then 
flinging open his fingers, the sat claimed gifts and obla- 
2 


323 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


tions from the crowd that flocked to St. Frideswide’s 
shrine on the ground that such recoveries of life and limb 
were quite as real as any that Frideswide ever wrought. 
Sickness and death in the prior’s story avenge the saint 
on her blasphemer, but no earthly power, ecclesiastical 
or civil, seems to. have ventured to deal with him. A 
more daring act of fanaticism showed the temper of the 
Jews even at the close of Henry the Third’s reign. As 
the usual procession of scholars and citizens returned from 
St. Frideswide’s on the Ascension Day of 1268 a Jew 
suddenly burst from a group of his comrades in front of 
the synagogue, and wrenching the crucifix from its bearer 
trod it under foot. But even in presence of such an out- 
rage as this the terror of the Crown sheltered the Oxford 
Jews from any burst of popular vengeance. The sentence 
of the King condemned them to set up a cross of marble 
on the spot where the crime was committed, but even 
this sentence was in part remitted, and a less offensive 
place was found for the cross in an open plot by Merton 
College. 

Up to Edward’s day indeed the royal protection had 
never wavered. Henry the Second granted the Jews a 
right of burial outside every city where they dwelt. 
Richard punished heavily a massacre of the Jews at York, 
and organized a mixed court of Jews and Christians for 
the registration of their contracts. John suffered none to 
plunder them save himself, though he once wrested from 
them a sum equal to a year’s revenue of his realm. The 
troubles of the next reign brought in a harvest greater 
than even the royal greed could reap; the Jews grew 
wealthy enough to acquire estates; and only a burst of 
popular feeling prevented a legal decision which would 
have enabled them to own freeholds. But the sack of 
Jewry after Jewry showed the popular hatred during the 
Barons’ war, and at its close fell on the Jews the more 
terrible persecution of the law. To the cry against usury 
and the religious fanaticism which threatened them was 
now added the jealousy with which the nation that had 
grown up round the Charter regarded all exceptional 
jurisdictions or exemptions from the common law and the 


THE CHARTER, 1201—1291. 323 


common burdens of the realm. As Edward looked on 
the privileges of the Church or the baronage, so his people 
looked on the privileges of the Jews. The growing 
weight of the Parliament told againstthem. Statute after 
statute hemmed themin. ‘They were forbidden to hold 
real property, to employ Christian servants, to move 
through the streets without the two white tablets of wool 
on their breasts which distinguished their race. They 
were prohibited from building new synagogues or eating 
with Christians or acting as physicians to them. Their 
trade, already crippled by the bankers of Cahors, was 
annihilated by a royal order which bade them renounce 
usury under pain of death. At last persecution could do 
no more, and Edward, eager at the moment to find sup- 
plies for his treasury and himself swayed by the fanati- 
cism of his subjects, bought the grant of a fifteenth from 
clergy and laity by consenting to drive the Jews from his 
realm. No share of the enormities which accompanied 
this expulsion can fall upon the King, for he not only 
suffered the fugitives to take their personal wealth with 
them but punished with the halter those who plundered 
them at sea. But the expulsion was none the less cruel. 
Of the sixteen thousand who preferred exile to apostasy 
few reached the shores of France. Many were wrecked, 
others robbed and flung overboard. One ship-master 
turned out a crew of wealthy merchants on to a sandbank 
and bade them call a new Moses to save them from the 
sea. 

From the expulsion of the Jews, as from his nobler 
schemes of legal and administrative reforms, Edward was 
suddenly called away to face complex questions which 
awaited him in the North. At the moment which we 
have reached the kingdom of the Scots was still an ag- 
eregate of four distinct countries, each with its different 
people, its different tongue, its different history. The 
old Pictish kingdom across the Firth of Forth, the origi- 
nal Scot kingdom in Argyle, the district of Cumbria or 
Strathclyde, and the Lowlands which stretched from the 
Firth of Forth to the English border, had become united 
under the Kings of the Scots; Pictland by inheritance, 


324 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Cumbria by a grant from the English King Eadmund, the 
Lowlands by conquest, confirmed as English tradition 
alleged by a grant from Cnut. The shadowy claim of 
dependence on the English Crown which dated from the 
days whena Scotch King “ commended ” himself and his 
people to Atlfred’s son Eadward, a claimstrengthened by 
the grant of Cumbria to Malcolm as a “fellow worker ” 
of the English sovereign “ by sea and land,” may have 
been made more real through this last convention. But 
whatever change the acquisition of the Lowlands made 
in the relation of the Scot Kings to the English sover- 
eigns, it certainly affected in a very marked way their re- 
lation both to England and to their own realm. Its first 
result was the fixing of the royal residence in their new 
southern dominion at Edinburgh; and the English civili- 
zation which surrounded them from the moment of this 
settlement on what was purely English ground changed 
the Scot Kings in all but blood into Englishmen. The 
marriage of King Maleolm with Margaret, the sister of 
Eadger Attheling, not only hastened this change but 
opened a way to the Enghshcrown. Their children were 
regarded by a large party within England as representa- 
tives of the older royal race and as claimants of the throne, 
and this danger grew as William’s devastation of the 
North not only drove fresh multitudes of Englishmen to 
settle in the Lowlands but filled the Scotch court with 
Enelish nobles who fled thither for refuge. So formida- 
ble indeed became the pretensions of the Scot Kings that 
they forced the ablest of our Norman sovereigns into a 
complete change of policy. The Conqueror and William 
the Red had met the threats of the Scot sovereigns by 
invasions which ended again and again in an illusory — 
homage, but the marriage of Henry the First with the 
Scottish Matilda robbed the claims of the Scottish line 
of much of their force while it enabled him to draw their 
kings into far closer relations with the Norman throne. 
King David not only abandoned the ambitious dreams of 
his predecessors to place himself at the head of his niece 
Matilda’s party in her contest with Stephen, but as 
Henry’s brother-in-law he figured as the first noble of the 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 325 


English Court and found English models and English 
support in the work of organization which he attempted 
within his own dominions. As the marriage with Mar- 
caret had changed Malcolm from a Celtic chieftain into 
an English King, so that of Matilda brought about the - 
conversion of David into a Norman and feudal sovereign. 
His court was filled with Norman nobles from the South, 
such as the Balliols and Bruces who were destined to 
play so great a part afterwards but who now for the first 
time obtained fiefs in the Scottish realm, and a feudal. 
jurisprudence modelled on that of England was intro- 
duced into the Lowlands. 

A fresh connexion between Scotland and the English 
sovereigns began with the grant of lordships within 
England itself to the Scot kings or theirsons. The Earl- 
dom of Northumberland was held by David’s son Henry, 
that of Huntingdon by Henry the Lion. Homage was 
sometimes rendered, whether for these lordships, for the 
Lowlands, or for the whole Scottish realm, but it was the 
eapture of William the Lion during the revolt of the 
English baronage which first suggested to the ambition 
of Henry the Second the project of a closer dependence 
of Scotland on the English Crown. To gain his freedom 
William consented to hold his kingdom of Henry and his 
heirs. The prelates and lords of Scotland did homage 
to Henry as to their direct lord, and a right of appeal in 
all Scotch causes was allowed to the superior court of 
the English suzerain.. From this bondage however Scot- 
land was freed by the prodigality of Richard, who allowed 
her to buy back the freedom she had forfeited. Both 
sides yell into their old position, but both were ceasing 
gradually to remember the distinctions between the vari- 
ous relations in which the Scot King stood for his differ- 
ent provinces tothe English Crown. Scotland had come 
to be thought of as a single country; and the court of 
London transferred to the whole of it those claims of 
direct feudal suzerainty which at most applied only to 
Strathclyde, while the court of Edinburgh looked on the 
English Lowlands as holding no closer relation to Eng- 
land than the Pictish lands beyond the Forth. Any 


326 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


difficulties which arose were evaded by a legal compro- 
mise. The Scot Kings repeatedly did homage to the Eng- 
lish sovereign, but with a reservation of rights which 
were prudently left unspecified. The English King ac- 
cepted the homage on the assumption that it was rendered 
to him as overlord of the Scottish realm, and this assump- 
tion was neither granted nor denied. For nearly a hun- 
dred years the relations of the two countries were thus 
kept peaceful and friendly, and the death of Alexander 
the Third seemed destined to remove even the necessity 
of protests by a closer union of thetwo kingdoms. Alex- 
ander had wedded his only daughter to the King of Nor- 
way, and after long negotiation the Scotch Parliament 
proposed the marriage of Margaret, “the Maid of Nor- 
way,’ the girl who was the only issue of this marriage 
and so heiress of the kingdom, with the son of Edward 
the First. It was, however, carefully provided in the 
marriage treaty which was concluded at Brigham in 1290, 
that Scotland should remain a separate and free kingdom, 
and that its laws and customs should be preserved inyio- 
late. No military aid was to be claimed by the English 
King, no Scotch appeal to be carried to an English court. 
But this project was abruptly frustrated by the child’s 
death during her voyage to Scotland in the following 
October, and with the rise of claimant after claimant of 
the vacant throne, Edward was drawn into far other re 
lations to the Scottish realm. 

Of the thirteen pretenders to the throne of Scotland 
only three could be regarded as serious claimants. By 
the extinction of the line of William the Lion the right 
of succession passed to the daughters of his brother 
David. The claim of John Balliol, Lord of Galloway, 
rested on his descent from the elder of these; that of 
Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale, on his descent from 
the second; that of John Hastings, Lord of Abergavenny, 
on his descent from the third. It is clear that at this 
crisis every one in Scotland or out of it recognized some 
sort of overlordship in Edward, for the Norwegian King, 
the Primate of St. Andrews, and seven of the Scotch 
Earls had already appealed to him before Margaret’s 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 327 


death ; and her death was followed by the consent both 
of the claimants and the Council of Regency to refer the 
question of the succession to his decision in a Parliament 
at Norham. But the overlordship which the Scots ac- 
knowledged was something far less direct and definite 
than the superiority which Edward claimed at the open- 
ing of this conference in May, 1291. His claim was sup- 
ported by excerpts from monastic chronicles and by the 
slow advance of an English army; while the Scotch 
lords, taken by surprise, found little help in the delay 
which was granted them. At the opening of June, there- 
fore,in common with nine of the claimants, they formally 
admitted Edward’s direct suzerainty. “To the nobles in 
fact the concession must have seemed a small one, for 
like the principal claimants they were for the most part 
Norman in blood, with estates in both countries, and 
looking for honors and pensions from the English Court, 
From the Commons who were gathered with the nobles 
at Norham no such admission of Edward’s claims could 
be extorted; but in Scotland, feudalized as it had been 
by David, the Commons were as yet of little weight and 
their opposition was quietly passed by. All the rights of 
a feudal suzerain were at once assumed by the English 
King; he entered into the possession of the country as 
into that of a disputed fief to be held by its overlord till 
the dispute was settled; his peace was sworn throughout 
the land, its castles delivered into his charge, while its 
bishops and nobles swore homage to him directly as their 
lord superior. Scotland was thus reduced to the subjec- 
tion which she had experienced under Henry the Second; 
but the full discussion which followed over the various 
claims to the throne showed that while exacting to the 
full what he believed to be his right, Edward desired to 
do justice to the country itself. The body of commis- 
sioners which the King named to report on the claims to 
the throne were mainly Scotch. A proposal for the 
partition of the realm among the claimants was rejected 
as contrary to Scotch law. On the report of the com- 
missioners after a twelvemonth’s investigation in favor 
of Balliol as representative of the elder branch at the 


Gar 


ot ae HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


-close of the year 1292, his homage was accepted for the 
whole kingdom of Scotland with a full acknowledgment 
of the services due from him to its overlord. The castles 
were at once delivered to the new monarch, and for a 
time there was peace. 

With the accession of Balliol and the rendering of his 
homage for the Scottish realm the greatness of Edward 
reached its height. He was lord of Britain as no English 
King had been before. The last traces of Welsh inde- 
pendence were trodden under foot. The shadowy claims 
of supremacy over Scotland were changed into a direct 
overlordship. Across the one sea Edward was lord of 
Guienne, across the other of Ireland, and in England 
itself a wise and generous policy had knit the whole 
nation round his throne. Firmly as he still clung to pre- 
rogatives which the baronage were as firm not to own, 
the main struggle for the Charter was over. Justice and 
good government were secured. The personal despotism 
which John had striven to build up, the imperial au- 
tocracy which had haunted the imagination of Henry the 
Third, were alike set aside. The rule of Edward, vigor- 
ous and effective as it was, was a rule of law, and of law 
enacted not by the royal will, but by the common council 
of the realm. Never had English ruler reached a greater 
height of power, nor was there any sign to warn the 
King of the troubles which awaited him. France, jealous 
as it was of his greatness and covetous of his Gascon pos- 
sessions, he could hold at bay. Wales was growing tran- 
quil Seotland gave few signs of discontent or restless- 
ness in the first year that followed the homage of its 
King. Under John Balliol it had simply fallen back into 
the position of dependence which it held under William 
the Lion,and Edward had no purpose of pushing further 
his rights as suzerain than Henry the Second had done. 
One claim of the English Crown indeed was soon a 
subject of dispute between the lawyers of the Scotch and 
of the English Council boards. Edward would have 
oranted as freely as Balliol himself that though Scotland 
was a dependent kingdom it was far from being an 
ordinary fief of the English Crown. By feudal custom a 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 329 


distinction had always been held to exist between the 
relations of a dependent king to a superior lord and 
those of a vassal noble to his sovereign. At Balliol’s 
homage indeed Edward had disclaimed any right to the 
ordinary feudal incidents of a fief, those of wardship or 
marriage, and in this disclaimer he was only repeating 
the reservations of the marriage treaty of Brigham. 
There were other customs of the Scotch realm as incon- 
testable as these. Even after the treaty of Falaise the 
Scotch King had not. been held bound to attend the 
council of the English baronage, to do service in English 
warfare, or to contribute on the part of his Scotch realm 
to English aids. If no express acknowledginent of these ~ 
rights had been made by Edward, for some time after his 
acceptance of Balliol’s homage they were practically ob- 
served. The claim of independent justice Was more 
doubtful, as it was of higher import than these. The 
judicial independence of Scotland had been expressly 
reserved in the marriage treaty. It was certain that no 
appeal from a Scotch King’s court to that of his overlord 
had been allowed since the days of William the Lion. 
But in the jurisprudence of the feudal lawyers the right. 
of ultimate appeal was the test of sovereignty, and 
Edward regarded Balliol’s homage as having placed him 
precisely in the position of William the Lion and sub- 
jected his decisions to those of his overlord. He was 
resolute therefore to assert the supremacy of his court 
and to receive Scotch appeals. 

Even here however the quarrel seemed likely to end 
only in legal bickering. Balliol at first gave way, and it 
was not till 1293 that he alleved himself forced by the 
resentment both of his Baronage and his people to take 
up an attitude of resistance. While appearing therefore 
formally at Westminster he refused to answer an appeal 
before the English courts save by advice of his Council. 
But real as the resentment of his barons may have been, 
it was not Scotland which really spurred Balliol to this 
defiance. His wounded pride had made him the tool 
of a power beyond the sea. The keenness with which 
France had watched every step of Edward’s success in the 


330 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


north sprang not merely from a natural jealousy of his 
greatness, but from its bearing on a great object of French 
ambition, One fragment of Eleanor’s inheritance still 
remained to her descendants, Guienne and Gascony, the 
fair lands along the Garonne and the territory which 
stretched south of that river to the Pyrenees. It was this 
territory that now tempted the greed of Philip the Fair, 
and it was in feeding the strife between England and the 
Scotch King that Philip saw an opening for winning it. 
French envoys therefore brought promises of aid to the 
Scotch Court ; and no sooner had these intrigues moved 
Balliol to resent the claims of his overlord than Philip 
found a pretext for open quarrel with Edward in the frays 
which went constantly on in the Channel between the 
mariners of Normandy and those of the Cinque Ports. 
They culminated at this moment in a great sea-fight which 
proved fatal to eight thousand Frenchmen, and for this 
Philip haughtily demanded redress. Edward saw at once 
the danger of his position. He did his best to allay the 
storm by promise of satisfaction to France, and by address- 
ing threats of punishment to the English seamen. But 
Philip still clung to his wrong, while the national passion 
which was to prove fora hundred years to come strong 
enough to hold down the royal policy of peace showed 
itself in a characteristic defiance with which the seamen 
of the Cinque Ports met Edward’s menaces. “ Be the 
King’s Council well advised,” ran this remonstrance, “ that 
if wrong or grievance be done them in any fashion against 
right, they will sooner forsake wives, children, and all 
that they have, and go seek though the seas where they 
shall think te make their profit.” In spite therefore of 
Edward’s efforts the contest continued, and Philip found 
in it an opportunity to cite the King before his court at 
Paris for wrongs done to him as suzerain. It was hard 
for Edward to dispute the summons without weakening 
the position which his own sovereign courts had taken 
up towards the Scotch King, and in a final effort to avert 
the conflict the Kine submitted to a legal decision of the 
question, and to a formal c>ssion of Guienne into Philip's 
hands for forty days in acknowledement of his supremacy. 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 331 


Bitter as the sacrifice must have been it failed to win 
peace. The forty days had no sooner passed than Philip 
refused to restore the fortresses which had been left in 
pledge. In February, 1294, he declared the English king 
contumacious, and in May declared his fiefs forfeited to 
the French Crown. Edward was driven to take up arms, 
but a revolt in Wales deferred the expedition to the 
following year. No sooner however was it again taken 
in hand than it became clear that a double danger had to 
be met. The summons which Edward addressed to the 
Scotch barons to follow him in arms to Guienne was dis- 
regarded. It was in truth, as we have seen, a breach of 
customary law, and was probably meant to force Scotland 
into an open declaration of its connexion with France. 
A secondsummons was followed by a more formal refusal. 
The greatness of the danger threw Edward on England 
itself. Fora war in Guienne and the north he needed 
supplies ; but he needed yet more the firm support of his 
people in a struggle which, littleas he foresaw its ultimate 
results, would plainly be one of great difficulty and dan- 
ger. In 1295 he called a Parliament to counsel with him 
on the affairs of the realm, but with the large statesman- 
ship which distinguished him he took this occasion of 
giving the Parliament a shape and organization which has 
left its assembly the most important event in English 
history. 

To realize its importance we must briefly review the 
changes by which the Great Council of the Norman 
Kings had been gradually transforming itself into what 
was henceforth to be known as the English Parliament. 
Neither the Meeting of the Wise Men before the Con- 
quest nor the Great Council of the Barons after it had 
been in any legal or formal way representative bodies. 
The first theoretically included all free holders of land, 
but it shrank at an early time into a gathering of earls, 
higher nobles, and bishops with the officers and thegns 
of the royal household. Little change was made in the 
composition of this assembly by the Conquest, for the 
Great Council of the Norman kings was supposed to in- 
clude all tenants who had directly of the Crown, the 


332 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


bishops and greater abbots (whose character as indepen- 
dent spiritual members tended more and more to merge 
in their position as barons), and the high officers of the 
Court. But though its composition remained the same, 
the character of the assembly was essentially altered ; 
from a free gathering of “ Wise Men” itsank to a Royal 
Court of feudal vassals. Its functions too seem to have 
become almost nominal and its powers to have been re- 
stricted to the sanctioning, without debate or possibility 
of refusal, all grants demanded from it by the Crown. 
But nominal as such a sanction might be, the “ counsel 
and consent” of the Great Council was necessary for the 
legal validity of every considerable fiscal or political 
measure. Its existence therefore remained an effectual 
protest against the imperial theories advanced by the 
lawyers of Henry the Second which declared all legisla- 
tive power to reside wholly in the sovereign. It was in 
fact under Henry that these assemblies became more 
regular, and their functions more important. The re- 
forms which marked his reign were issued in the Great 
Council, and even financial matters were suffered to be 
debated there. But it was not till the grant of the Great 
Charter that the powers of this assembly over taxation 
were formally recognized, and the principle established 
that no burden beyond the customary feudal aids might 
be imposed “save by the Common Council of the 
Realm.” 

The same document first expressly regulated its form. 
In theory, as we have seen, the Great Council consisted 
of all who held land directly of the Crown. But the 
same causes which restricted attendance at the Witen- 
agemote to the greater nobles told on the actual compo- 
sition of the Council of Barons. While the attendance 
of the ordinary tenants in chief, the Knights or “ Lesser 
Barons” as they were called, was burdensome from its 
expense to themselves, their numbers and their depen- 
dence on the higher nobles made the assembly of these 
knights dangerous to the Crown. As early therefore as 
the time of Henry the First we find a distinction recog- 
nized between the “ Greater Barons,” of whom the Coun- 


> pan CHARTER. 1204—1291. - 688 


cil was usually composed, and the ‘“ Lesser Barons’ who 
formed the bulk of the tenants of the Crown. But 
though the attendance of the latter had become rare their 
right of attendance remained intact. While enacting 
that the prelates and greater barons should be summoned 
by special writs to each gathering of the Council a re- 
markable provision of the Great Charter orders a general 
summons to be issued through the Sheriff to all direct 
tenants of the Crown. The provision was probably in- 
tended to rouse the lesser Baronage to the exercise of 
rights which had practically passed into desuetude, but 
as the clause is omitted in later issues of the Charter we 
may doubt whether the principle it embodied ever re- 
ceived more than a very limited application. There are 
_ traces of the attendance of a few of the lesser knight- 
hood, gentry perhaps of the neighborhood where the as- 
sembly was held, in some of its meetings under Henry 
the Third, but till a late period in the reign of his suc- 
cessor the Great Council practically remained a oather- 
ing of the greater barons, the prelates, and the high © 
officers of the Crown. 

The change which the Great Charter had failed to ac- 
complish was now however brought about by the social 
circumstances of the time. One of the most remarkable 
of these was a steady decrease in the number of the 
greater nobles. The bulk of the earldoms had already 
lapsed to the Crown through the extinction of the families 
of their possessors; of the greater baronies, many had 
practically ceased to exist by their division among female 
co-heiresses, many through the constant struggle of the 
poorer nobles to rid themselves of their rank by a dis- 
claimer so as to escape the burden of higher taxation and 
attendance in Parliament which it involved. How far 
this diminution had gone we may see from the fact. that 
hardly more than a hundred barons sat in the earlier 
Councils of Edward’s reign. But while the number of 
those who actually exercised the privilege of assisting in 
Parliament was rapidly diminishing, the numbers and 
wealth of the “lesser baronage,” whose right of attend- 
ance had become a mere a aerial tradition, was as 


334 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


rapidly increasing. The long peace and prosperity of 
the realm, the extension of its commerce and the increased. 
export of wool, were swelling the ranks and incomes of 
the country gentry as well as of the freeholders and sub- 
stantial yeomanry. We have already noticed the effects 
of the increase of wealth in begetting a passion for the 
possession of land, which makes this reign so critical a 
period in the history of the English freeholder; but the 
same tendency had to some extent existed in the preced- 
ing century, and it was a consciousness of the growing 
importance of this class of rural proprietors which in- 
duced the barons at the moment of the Great Charter to 
make their fruitless attempt to induce them to take part 
in the deliberations of the Great Council. But while the 
barons desired their presence as an aid against the Crown, 
the Crown itself desired it as a means of rendering taxa- 
tion more efficient. So long as the Great Council re- 
mained a mere assembly of magnates it was necessary 
for the King’s ministers to treat separately with the other 
orders of the state as to the amount and assessment of 
their contributions. The grant made in the Great Coun- 
cil was binding only on the barons and prelates who 
made it; but before the aids of the boroughs, the Church, 
or the shires could reach the royal treasury, a separate 
negotiation had to be conducted by the officers of the 
Exchequer with the reeves of each town, the sheriff and 
shire-court of each county, and the archdeacons of each 
diocese. Bargains of this sort would be the more tedious 
and disappointing as the necessities of the Crown in- 
creased in the later years of Edward, and it became a 
matter of fiscal expediency to obtain the sanction of any 
proposed taxation through the presence of these classes 
in the Great Council itself. 

The effort however to revive the old personal attendance 
of the lesser baronage which had broken down half a 
century before could hardly be renewed at a time when 
the increase of their numbers made it more impracticable 
than ever; but a means of escape from this difficulty was 
fortunately suggested by the very nature of the court 
through which alone a summons could be addressed to 


THE CHARTER. 12041—1291. Dos 


the landed knighthood. Amidst the many judicial 
reforms of Henry or Edward the Shire Court remained 
unchanged. The haunted mound or the immemorial oak 
round which the assembly gathered (for the court was 
often held in the open air) were the relics of a time 
before the free kingdom had sunk into a shire and its 
Meetings of the Wise into a County Court. But save 
that the King’s reeve had taken the place of the King 
and that the Norman legislation had displaced the Bishop. 
and set four Coroners by the Sheriff's side, the gatheriug 
of the freeholders remained much as of old. The local 
knighthood, the yeomanry, the husbandmen of the county, » 
were all represented in the crowd that gathered round 
the Sheriff, as guarded by his liveried followers he 
published the King’s writs, announced his demand of 
aids, received the presentment of criminals and the 
inquest of the local jurors, assessed the taxation of each 
district, or listened solemnly to appeals for justice, civil 
and criminal, from all who held themselves oppressed in 
the lesser courts of the hundred or the soke. It was in 
the County Court alone that the Sheriff could legally 
summon the lesser baronage to attend the Great Council, 
and it was in the actual constitution of this assembly 
that the Crown found a solution of the difficulty which 
we have stated. For the principle of representation by 
which it was finally solved was coeval with the Shire 
Court itself. In all cases of civil or criminal justice the 
twelve sworn assessors of the Sheriff, as members of 
a class, though not formally deputed for that purpose, 
practically represented the judicial opinion of the county 
at large. From every hundred came groups of twelve 
sworn deputies, the “jurors ” through whom the present- 
ments of the district were made to the royal officer and 
with whom the assessment of its share in the general 
taxation was arranged. The husbandmen on the out- 
skirts of the crowd, clad in the brown smock frock which 
still lingers in the garb of our carters and ploughmen, 
were broken up into little knots of five, a reeve and four 
assistants, each of which knots formed the representative 
of a rural township. If in fact we regard the Shire 


336 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Courts as lineally the descendants of our earliest English 
Witenagemotes, we may justly claim the principle of 
parliamentary representation as among the oldest of our 
institutions. : 

It was easy to give this principle a further extension 
by the choice of representatives of the lesser barons in 
the shire courts to which they were summoned; but it 
was only slowly and tentatively that this process was 
applied to the reconstitution of the Great Council. As 
early as the close of John’s reign there are indications of 
approaching change in the summons of “four discreet 
knights ” from every county. Fresh need of local sup- 
port was felt by both parties in the conflict of the suc- 
ceeding reign, and Henry and his barons alike summoned 
knights from each shire “to meet on the common business 
of the realm.” It was no doubt with the same purpose 
that the writs of Earl Simon ordered the choice of knights 
in each shire for his famous Parliament of 1265. Some- 
thing like a continuous attendance may be dated from 
the accession of Edward, but it was long before the 
knights were regarded as more than local deputies for 
the assessment of taxation or admitted to a share in the 
general business of the Great Council. The statute 
‘“‘Quia Emptores,” for instance, was passed in it before 
the knights who had been summoned could attend. 
Their participation in the deliberative power of Parlia- 
ment, as well as their regular and continuous attendance, 
dates only from the Parliament of 1295. But a far 
ereater constitutional change in their position had 
already taken place through. the extension of electoral 
rights to the freeholders at large. ‘The one class entitled 
to a seat in the Great Council was, as we have seen, that 
of the lesser baronage; and it was of the lesser baronage 
alone that the knights were in theory the representatives. 
But the necessity of holding their election in the County 
Court rendered any restriction of the electoral body 
physically impossible. The court wag compesed of the 
whole body of freeholders, and no sheriff could distinguish 
the “aye, aye” of the yeoman from the “aye, aye” of 
the lesser baron. From the first moment therefore of 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 337 


their attendance we find the knights regarded not as 
mere representatives of the baronage but as knights of 
the shire, and by this silent revolution the whole body 
of the rural freeholders were admitted to a share in the 
government of the realm. 

The financial difficulties of the Crown led to a far 
more radical revolution in the admission into the Great 
Council of representatives from the boroughs. The 
presence of knights from each shire was the recognition 
of an older right, but no right of attendance or share in 
the national ‘“ counsel and assent” could be pleaded for 
the burgesses of the towns. On the other hand the rapid 
development of their wealth made them every day more 
important as elements in the national taxation. From 
all payment of the dues or fines exacted by the King as 
the original lord of the soil on which they had in most 
cases grown up, the towns had long since freed them- 
selves by what was called the purchase of the “ farm of 
the borough ;” in other words, by the commutation of 
these uncertain dues for a fixed sum paid annually to the 
Crown and apportioned by their own magistrates among 
the general body of the burghers. All that the King 
legally retained was the right enjoyed by every great 
proprietor of levying a corresponding taxation on his 
tenants in demesne under the name of “a free aid” 
whenever a grant was made for the national necessities 
by the barons of the Great Council. But the temptation 
of appropriating the growing wealth of the mercantile 
class proved stronger than legal restrictions, and we find 
both Henry the Third and his son assuming a right of 
imposing taxes at pleasure and without any authority 
from the Council even over London itself. The bur-. 
gesses could refuse indeed the invitation to contribute 
to the “free aids” demanded by the royal officers, but 
the suspension of their markets or trading privileges 
brought them in the end to submission. Each of these 
‘free aids,” however, had to be extorted after a long 
wrangle between the borough and the officers of the 
Exchequer ; and if the towns were driven to comply with 
what they considered an extortion they could generally 


338 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


force the Crown by evasions and delays to a compromise 
and abatement of its original demands. 

The same financial reasons therefore existed for desir- 
ing the presence of borough representatives in the Great 
Council as existed in the case of the shires; but it was 
the genius of Earl Simon which first broke through the 
older constitutional tradition and summoned two bur- 
gesses from each town to the Parliament of 1265. Time 
had indeed to pass before the large and statesmanlike 
conception of the great patriot could meet with full ac- 
ceptance. Through the earlier part of Edward’s reign 
we find a few instances of the presence of representatives 
from the towns, but their scanty numbers and the irreg- 
ularity of their attendance show that they were sum- 
moned rather to afford financial information to the Great 
Council than as representatives in it of an Estate of the 
Realm. But every year pleaded stronger and stronger 
for their inclusion, and in the Parliament of 1295 that of 
1265 found itself at last reproduced. ‘It was from me 
that he learned it,” Earl Simon had cried, as he recog- 
nized the military skill of Edward’s onset at Evesham ; 
“it was from me that he learnt it,” his spirit might have 
exclaimed as he saw the King gathering at last two bur- 
gesses “from every city, borough, and leading town” 
within his realm to sit side by side with the knights, 
nobles, and barons of the Great Council. To the Crown 
the change was from the first an advantageous one. The — 
grants of subsidies by the burgesses in Parliament proved 
more profitable than the previous extortions of the Ex- 
chequer. The proportions of their grant generally ex- 
ceeded that of the other estates. Their representatives 
too proved far more compliant with the royal will than 
the barons or knights of the shire; only on one occasion 
during Edward’s reign did the burgesses waver from 
their general support of the Crown. 

It was easy indeed to control them, for the selection 
of boroughs to be represented remained wholly in the 
King’s hands, and their numbers could be increased or 
diminished at the King’s pleasure. The determination 
was left to the sheriff, and at a hint from the royal 


THE CHARTER, -1204—1291. 339 


Council a sheriff of Wilts would cut down the number of 
represented boroughs in his shire from eleven to three, 
or a sheriff of Bucks declare he could find but a single 
borough, that of Wycomb, within the bounds of his 
county. Nor was this exercise of the prerogative ham- 
pered by any anxiety on the part of the towns to claim 
representative privileges. It was hard to suspect that a 
power before which the Crown would have to bow lay 
in the ranks of soberly-clad traders, summoned only to 
assess the contributions of their boroughs, and whose 
attendance was as difficult to secure as it seemed burden- 
some to themselves and the towns who sent them. The 
mass of citizens took little or no part in their choice, for 
they were elected in the county court by a few of the 
principal burghers deputed for the purpose; but the cost 
of their maintenance, the two shillings a day paid to the 
burgess by his town as four were paid to the knight by 
his county, was a burden from which the boroughs made 
desperate efforts to escape. Some persisted in making no 
return to the sheriff. Some bought charters of exemption 
from the troublesome privilege. Of the 165 who were 
summoned by Edward the First more than a third ccased 
to send representatives after asingle compliance with the 
royal summons. During the whole time from the reign of 
Edward the Third to the reign of Henry the Sixth the 
sheriff of Lancashire declined to return the names of any 
horoughs at all within that county ‘on account of their 
poverty.” Nor were the representatives themselves more 
anxious to appear than their boroughs tosend them. The 
busy country squire and the thrifty trader were equally 
reluctant to undergo the trouble and expense of a journey 
to Westminster. Legal measures were often necessary to 
ensure their presence. Writs still exist in abundance such 
as that by which Walter le Rous is “ held to bail in eight 
oxen and four cart-horses to come before the King on the 
day specified” for attendance in Parliament. Butin spite 
of obstacles such as these the presence of representatives 
from the boroughs may be regarded as continuous from the 
Parliament of 1295. As the representation of the lesser 
barons had widened through a silent change into that of 


340 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the shire, so that of the boroughs—restricted in theory 
to those in the royal demesne—seems practically from 
Edward's time to have been extended to all who were in a | 
condition to pay the cost of their representatives’ support. 
By a change as silent within the Parliament itself the 
burgess, originally summoned to take part only in matters 
of taxation, was at last admitted to a full share in the de- 
liberations and authority of the other orders of the State. 

The admission of the burgesses and knights of the shire | 
to the assembly of 1295 complete the fabric of our 
representative constitution. The Great Council of the 
Barons became the Parliament of the Realm. Every order 
of the state found itselfrepresented in this assembly, and 
took part in the grant of supplies, the work of legislation, 
and in the end the control of government. But thoughin 
all essential points the character of Parliament has re- 
mained the same from that time to this, there were some 
remarkable particulars in which the assembly of 1295 dif- 
fered widely from the present Parliament at St. Stephen’s. 
Some of these differences, such as those which sprang 
from the increased powers and changed relations of the 
different orders among themselves, we shall have occasion 
to consider at a later time. . But a difference of a far 
more startling kind than these lay in the presence of the 
clergy. If there is any part in the parliamentary scheme 
of Edward the First which can be regarded as especially 
his own, it is his project for the representation of the 
ecclesiastical order. The King had twice at least sum- 
moned its “ proctors”’ to Great Councils before 1295, but 
it was then only that the complete representation of the 
Church was definitely organized by the insertion of a 
clause in the writ which summoned a bishop to Parliament 
requiring the personal attendance of all archdeacons, 
deans, or priors of cathedral churches, of a proctor for 
each cathedral chapter, and two for the clergy within his 
diocese. The clause is repeated in the writs of the present 
day, but its practical effect was foiled almost from the 
first by the resolute opposition of those to whom it was 
addressed. What the towns failed in doing the clergy 
actually did. Even when forced to comply with the royal 


THE CHARTER. 1204—129T. 341 


summons, as they seem to have been forced during Ed- 
ward's reign, they sat jealously by themselves, and their 
refusal to vote supphes in any but their own provincial 
assemblies, or convocations, of Canterbury and York left 
the Crown without a motive for insisting on their con- 
tinued attendance. Their presence indeed, though still 
at times granted on some solemn occasions, became so 
pure a formality that by the end of the fifteenth century 
it had sunk wholly into desuetude. In their anxiety to 
preserve their existence as an isolated and privileged order 
the clergy flung away a power which, had they retained 
it, would have ruinously hampered the healthy develop- 
ment of the state. To takea single instance, it is difficult 
to see how the great changes of the Reformation could 
have been brought about had a good half of the House 
of Commons consisted purely of churchmen, whose num- 
bers would have been backed by the weight of their prop- 
erty as possessors of a third of the landed estates of the 
realm. 

A hardly less important difference may be found in 
the gradual restriction of the meetings of Parliament to 
Westminster. Thename of Edward's statutes remind us 
of its convocation at the most various quarters, at Win- 
chester, Acton Burnell, Northampton. It was at a later 
time that Parhament became settled in the straggling 
village which had grown up in the marshy swamp of the 
Isle of Thorns beside the palace whose embattled pile 
towered over the Thames and the new Westminster 
which was still rising in Edward’s day on the site of the 
older church of the Confessor. It is possible that, while 
contributing greatly to its constitutional importance, this 
settlement of the Parliament may have helped to throw 
into the background its character as a supreme court of 
appeal. Theproclamation by whichit was called together 
invited “all who had any grace to demand of the King 
in Parliament, or any plaint to make of matters which 
could not be redressed or determined by ordinary course 
of law, or who had been in any way aggrieved by any of 
the King’s ministers or justices or sheriffs, or their bailiffs, 
or any other officer, or have been unduly assessed, rated, 


842 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


charged, or sur-charged to aids, subsidies, or taxes,” to 
deliver their petitions to receivers who sat in the Great 
Hall of the Palace of Westminster. The petitions were 
forwarded to the King’s Council, and it was probably 
the extension of the jurisdiction of that body and the 
rise of the Court of Chancery which reduced this ancient 
right of the subject to the formal election of “ Triers of 
Petitions’ at the opening of every new Parliament by 
the House of Lords, a usage which is still continued. 
But it must have been owing to some memory of the 
older custom that the subject always looked for redress 
against injuries from the Crown or its ministers to the 
Parliament of the realm. 

The subsidies granted by the Parliament of 1295 fur- 
nished the King with the means of warfare with both 
Scotland and France, while they assured him of the sym- 
pathy of his people in the contest. But from the first 
the reluctance of Edward to enter on the double war 
was strongly marked. The refusal of the Scotch baronage 
to obey his summons had been followed on Balliol’s part 
by two secret steps which made a struggle inevitable—by 
a request to Rome for absolution from his oath of fealty 
and by a treaty of alliance with Philip the Fair. As yet 
however no open breach had taken place, and while 
Edward in 1296 summoned his knighthood to meet him 
in the north, he called a Parliament at Newcastle in the 
hope of bringing about an accommodation with the Scot 
King. But all thought of accommodation was roughly 
ended by the refusal of Balliol to attend the Parliament, 
by the rout of a small body of English troops, and by 
the Scotch investment of Carlisle. Taken as he was by 
surprise, Edward showed at once the vigor and rapidity 
of his temper. His army marched upon Berwick. ‘The 
town was arich and well-peopled one, and although a 
wooden stockade furnished its only rampart the serried 
ranks of citizens behind it gave little hope of an easy 
conquest. Their taunts indeed stung the King to the 
quick. As his engineers threw up rough entrenchments 
for the besieging army the burghers bade him wait till he 
won the town before he began diggingroundit. “ Kynge 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 343 


Edward,” they shouted, “ waune thou havest Berwick, 
pike thee ; waune thou havest geten, dike thee.” But the 
stockade was stormed with the loss of a single knight, 
nearly eight thousand of the citizens were mown downin 
a ruthless carnage, and a handful of Flemish traders who 
held the town-hall stoutly against all assailants were 
burned alive init. The massacre only ceased whena 
procession of priests bore the host to the King’s presence, 
praying for mercy. Edward with a sudden and charac- 
teristic burst of tears called off his troops; but the town: 
was ruined forever, and the greatest merchant city of 
northern Britain sank from that time into a petty sea- 
ort. 
2 At Berwick Edward received Balliol’s formal defiance. 
“‘ Has the fool done this folly ?” the King cried in haughty 
scorn; ‘if he will not come to us, we will come to him.” 
The terrible slaughter however had done its work, and 
his march northward was a triumphal progress. Edin- 
burgh, Stirling, and Perth opened their gates, Bruce 
joined the English army, and Balliol himself surrendered 
and passed without a blow from his throne to an English 
prison. No further punishment however was exacted 
from the prostrate realm. Edward simply treated it asa 
fief, and declared its forfeiture to be the legal consequence 
of Balliol’s treason. It lapsed in fact to its suzerain ; and 
its earls, barons, and gentry swore homage in Parliament 
at Berwick to Edward as their King. ‘The sacred stone 
on which its older sovereigns had been installed, an ob- 
long Llock of limestone which legend asserted to have 
been the pillow of Jacob as angels ascended and descended 
upon him, was removed from Scone and placed in West- 
minster by the shrine of the Confessor. It was enclosed 
by Edward’s order in a stately seat, which became from 
that hour the coronation chair of English Kings. To the 
King himself the whole business must have seemed another 
and easier conquest of Wales, and the mercy and just goy- 
ernment which had followed his first success followed his 
second also. The government of the new dependency was 
entrusted to John es Warenne, Earl of Surrey, at the head 
of an English Council of Regency. Pardon was freely 


344 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


extended to all who had resisted the invasion, and order 
and public peace were rigidly enforced. 

But the triumph, rapid and complete as it was, had 
more than exhausted the aid granted by the Parliament. 
The treasury was utterly drained. The struggle indeed 
widened as every month went on; the costly fight with 
the French in Gascony called for supplies, while Edward 
was planning a yet costlier attack on Northern France 
with the aid of Flanders. Need drove him on his return 
from Scotland in 1297 to measures of tyrannical extor- 
tion which seemed to recall the times of John. His first 
blow fell on the Chureh. At the close of 1294 he had 
already demanded half their annual income from the 
clergy, and so terrible was his wrath at their resistance 
that the Dean of St. Paul’s, who stood forth to remon- 
strate, dropped dead of sheer terror at his feet. ‘ If any 
oppose the King’s demand,” said a royal envoy in the 
midst of the Convocation, “let him stand up that he 
may be noted as an enemy to the King’s peace.’ The 
outraged Churchmen fell back on an untenable plea that 
their aid was due solely to Rome, and alleged the bull 
of “ Clericis Laicos,” issued by Boniface the Eighth at this 
moment, a bull which forbad the clergy to pay secular 
taxes from their ecclesiastical revenues, as a ground for 
refusing to comply with further taxation. In 1297 
Archbishop Winchelsey refused on the ground of this 
to make any grant, and Edward met his refusal by a gen- 
eral outlawry of the whole order. The King’s courts 
were closed, and all justice denied to those who refused 
the King aid. By their actual plea the clergy had put 
themselves formally in the wrong, and the outlawry soon 
forced them tosubmission ; but their aid did little to re- 
eruit the exhausted treasury. The pressure of the war 
steadily increased, and far wider measures of arbitrary 
taxation were needful to equip an expedition which Ed- 
ward prepared to lead in person to Flanders. The 
country gentlemen were compelled to take up knight- 
hood or to compound for exemption from the burden- 
some honor, and forced contributions of cattle and corn 
were demanded from the counties. Edward no doubt 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 345. 


purposed to pay honestly for these supplies, but his ex- 
actions from the merchant class rested on a deliber- 
ate theory of his royal rights. He looked on the cus- 
toms as levied absolutely at his pleasure, and the ex- 
port duty on wool—now the staple produce of the 
country—was raised to six times its former amount. Al- 
though he infringed no positive provision of charter or 
statute in his action, it was plain that his course really 
undid all that had been gained by the Barons’ war. 
But the blow had no sooner been struck than Edward 
found stout resistance within his realm. The barons 
drew together and called a meeting for the redress of 
their grievances. The two greatest of the English no- 
bles, Humfrey de Bohun, Karl of Hereford, and Roger 
Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, placed themselves at the head of 
the opposition. The first was Constable, the second 
Earl Marshal, and Edward bade them lead a force to 
Gascony as his leutenants while he himself sailed to 
Flanders. Their departure would have left the Baron- 
age without leaders, and the two earls availed them- 
selves of a plea that they were not bound to foreign 
service save in attendance on the King to refuse obedi- 
ence to the royal orders. ‘ By God, Sir Earl,” swore the 
King to the Earl Marshal, “you shall either go or hang!” 
“ By God, Sir King,” was the cool reply, “ I will neither 
go nor hang!” Both parties separated in bitter anger ; 
the King to seize fresh wool, to outlaw the clergy, and 
to call an army to his aid; the barons to gather in arms, 
backed by the excommunication of the Primate. But 
the strife went no further than words. Ere the Parlia- 
ment he had convened could meet, Edward had discoy- 
ered his own powerlessness; Winchelsey offered his me- 
diation ; and Edward confirmed the Great Charter and 
the Charter of Forests as the price of a grant from the 
clergy and a subsidy from the Commons. With one of 
those sudden revulsions of feeling of which his nature 
was capable the King stood before his people in West- 
minster Hall and owned with a burst of tears that he 
had taken their substance without due warrant of law. 
His passionate appeal to their loyalty wrested a reluc- 


— 


346 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


tant assent to the prosecution of the war, and in August 
Edward sailed for Flanders, leaving his son regent of 
the realm. But the crisis had taught the need of further 
securities against the royal power, and as Edward was 
about to embark the barons demanded his acceptance of 
additional articles to the Charter, expressly renouncing 
his right of taxing the nation without its own consent. 
The King sailed without complying, but Winchelsey 
joined the two earls and the citizens of London in for- 
bidding any levy of supplhes till the Great Charter with 
these clauses was again confirmed; and the trouble in 
Scotland as well as the still pending strife with France 
left Edward helpless in the barons’ hands. The Great 
Charter and the Charter of the Forests were solemnly 
confirmed by him at Ghent in November; and formal 
pardon was issued to the Earls of Hereford and Norfolk. 

The confirmation of the Charter, the renunciation of 
any right to the exactions by which the people were ag- 
grieved, the pledge that the King would no more take 
“such aids, tasks, and prizes but by common assent of 
the realm,” the promise not to impose on wool any heavy 
customs or * mfletot ” without the same assent, was the 
close of the great struggle which had begun at R-nny- 
mede. The clauses so soon removed from the Great 
Charter were now restored; and evade them as they 
might, the kings were never able to free themselves from 
the obligation to seek aid solely from the general consent 
of their subjects. 1t was Scotland which had won this 
victory for English freedom. At the moment when 
Edward and the earls stood face to face the King saw his 
work in the north suddenly undone. Both the justice 
and injustice of the new rule proved fatal to it. The 
wrath of the Scots, already kindled by the intrusion of 
English priests into Scotch livings and by the grant of 
lands across the border to English barons, was fanned to 
fury by the strict administration of law and the repres- 
sion of feuds and cattle-lifting. The disbanding too of 
troops, which was caused by the penury of the royal ex- 
chequer, united with the licence of the soldiery who 
remained to quicken the national sense of wrong. The 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 347 


disgraceful submission of their leaders brought the people 
themselves to the front. In spite of a hundred years of 
peace the farmer of Fife or the Lowlands and the artizan 
of the towns remained stout-hearted Northumbrian Eng- 
lishmen. They had never consented to Edward’s suprem- 
acy, and their blood rose against the insolent rule of the 
stranger. The genius of an outlaw knight, William 
Wallace, saw in their smouldering discontent a hope ot 
freedom for his country, and his daring raids on outlying 
parties of the English soldiery roused the country at last 
into revolt. 

Of Wallace himself, of his life or temper, we know 
little or nothing; the very traditions of his gigantic 
stature and enormous strength are dim and unhistorical. 
But the instinct of the Scotch people has guided it aright 
in choosing him for its national hero. He was the first 
to assert freedom as a national birthright, and amidst the 
despair of nobles and priests to call the people itself to 
arms. At the head of an army drawn principally from 
the coast districts north of the Tay, which were inhabited 
by a population of the same blood as that of the Low: 
lands, Wallace, in September, 1297, encamped near Stir- 
ling, the pass between the north and the south, and 
awaited the English advance. It was here that he was 
found by the English army. The offers of John of War- 
enne were scornfully rejected: ‘‘We have come,” said 
the Scottish leader, ‘‘ not to make peace, but to free our 
country.” The position of Wallace behind a loop of 
Forth was in fact chosen with consummate skill. The 
one bridge which crossed the river was only broad enough 
to admit two horsemen abreast; and though the English 
army had been passing from daybreak but half its force 
was across at noon, when Wallace closed on it and cut it 
after a short combat to pieces in sight of its comrades. 
The retreat of the Earl of Surrey over the border left 
Wallace head of the country he had freed, and for a few 
months he acted as * Guardian of the Realm ” in Balliol’s 
name, and headed a wild foray into Northumberland in 
which the barbarous cruelties of his men left a bitter 
hatred behind them which was to wreak its vengeance in 


348 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the later bloodshed of the war. His reduction of Stir- 
ling Castle at last called Edward to the field. In the 
spring of 1298 the King’s diplomacy had at last wrung a 
truce for two years from Philip the Fair; and he at once 
returned to England to face the troubles in Scotland. 
Marching northward with a larger host than had ever 
followed his banner, he was enabled by treachery to sur- 
prise Wallace as he fell back to avoid an engagement, 
and to force him on the twenty-second of July to hattle 
near Falkirk. The Scotch force consisted almost wholly 
of foot, and Wallace drew up his spearmen in four great 
hollow circles or squares, the outer ranks kneeling and 
the whole supported by bow-men within, while a small 
force of horse were drawn up as a reserve in the rear. It 
was the formation of Waterloo, the first appearance in 
our history since the day of Senlac of “that uneonquer- 
able British infantry” before which chivalry was des- 
tined to go down. For a moment it had all Waterloo’s 
success. “I have brought you to the ring, hop (dance) 
if you can,” are words of rough humor that reveal the 
very soul of the patriot leader, and the serried ranks 
answered well to his appeal. The Bishop of Durham 
who led the English van shrank wisely from the look of 
the squares. ‘ Back to your mass, Bishop,” shouted the 
reckless knights behind him, but the body of horse 
dashed itself vainly on the wallof spears. Terror spread 
through the English army, and its Welsh auxiliaries 
drew off in a body from the field. But the generalship 
of Wallace was met by that of the King. Drawing his 
bow-men to the front, Edward riddled. the Scottish ranks 
with arrows and then hurled his cavalry afresh on the 
wavering line. In a moment all was over, the maddened 
knights rode in and out of the broken ranks, slaying 
without mercy. ‘Thousands fell on the field, and Wallace 
himself escaped with difficulty, followed by a handful of 
men. 

But ruined as the cause of freedom seemed, his work 
was done. He had roused Scotland into life, and even 
a defeat like Falkirk left her unconquered. Edward 
remained master only of the ground he stood on: want 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 349 


of supplies forced him at last to retreat; and in the 
summer of the following year, 1299, when Balliol, released 
from his English prison, withdrew into France, a regency 
of the Scotch nobles under Robert Bruce and John 
Comyn continued the struggle for independence. 
Troubles at home and danger from abroad stayed Ed- 
ward’s hand. ‘The barons still distrusted his sincerity, 
and though at their demand he renewed the Confirmation 
in the spring of 1299, his attempt to add an evasive 
clause saving the right of the Crown proved the justice 
of their distrust. In spite of a fresh and unconditional 
renewal of it a strife over the Forest Charter went on 
till the opening of 1801, when a new gathering of the 
barons in arms with the support of Archbishop Win- 
chelsey wrested from him its full execution. What 
aided freedom within was as of old the peril without. 
France was still menacing, and a claim advanced by 
Pope Boniface the Eighth at its suggestion to the feudal 
superiority over Scotland arrested a new advance of the 
King across the border. A quarrel however which broke 
out between Philip le Bel and the Papacy removed all 
obstacles. It enabled Edward to defy Boniface and to 
wring from France a treaty in which Scotland was 
abandoned. In 1304 he resumed the work of invasion, 
and again the nobles flung down theirarms as he marched 
to the North. Comyn, at the head of the Regency, 
acknowledged his sovereignty, and the surrender of 
Stirling completed the conquest of Scotland. But the 
triumph of Edward was only the prelude to the carrying 
out of his designs for knitting the two countries together 
by a generosity and wisdom which reveal the greatness 
of his statesmanship. A general amnesty was extended 
to all who had shared in the resistance. Wallace, who 
refused to avail himself of Edward’s mercy, was captured 
and condemned to death at Westminster on charges of 
treason, sacrilege, and robbery. The head of the great 
patriot, crowned in mockery with a circlet of laurel, was 
placed upon London Bridge. But the execution of 
Wallace was the one blot on Edward’s clemency. With 
a masterly boldness he entrusted the government of the 


350 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


country to a council of Scotch nobles, many of whom 
were freshly pardoned for their share in the war, and 
anticipated the policy of Cromwell by allotting ten 
representatives to Scotland in the Common Parliament 
of his realm. A convocation was summoned at Perth 
for the election of these representatives, and a great 
judicial scheme which was promulgated in this assembly 
adopted the amended laws of King David as the base of 
a new legislation, and divided the country for judicial 
purposes into four districts, Lothian, Galloway, the 
Highlands, and the land between the Highlands and the 
Forth, at the head of each of which were placed two 
justiciaries, the one English and the other Scotch. 

With the conquest and settlement of Scotland the 
elory of Edward seemed again complete. The bitterness 
of his humiliation at home indeed still preyed upon him, 
and in measure after measure we see his purpose of 
renewing the strife with the baronage. In 1303 he found 
a means of evading his pledge to levy no new taxes on 
merchandise save by assent of the realm in a consent of 
the foreign merchants, whether procured by royal pressure 
or no, to purchase by stated payments certain privileges 
of trading. In this “ New Custom” lay the origin of 
our import duties. A formal absolution from his promises 
which he obtained from Pope Clement the Fifth in 1805 
showed that he looked on his triumph in the North as 
enabling him to reopen the questions which he had yielded. 
But again Scotland stayed his hand. Only four months 
had. passed since its submission, and he was preparing 
for a joint Parliament of the two nations at Carlisle, 
when the conquered country suddenly sprang again to ~ 
arms. Its new leader was Robert Bruce, a grandson of 
one of the original claimants of the crown. The Norman 
house of Bruce formed a part of the Yorkshire baronage, 
but it had acquired through intermarriages the Earldom 
of Carrick and the Lordship of Annandale. Both the 
claimant and his son had been pretty steadily on the 
English side in the contest with Balliol and Wallace, 
and Robert haa aimself been trained in the Knelish court 
and stood high in the King’s favor. But the withdrawal 


THE CHARTER. 1204—1291. 351 


of Balliol gave a new force to his claims upon the crown, 
and the discovery of an intrigue which he had set on 
foot with the Bishop of St. Andrews so roused Edward’s 
jealousy that Bruce fled for his lite across the border. 
Early in 1306 he met Comyn, the Lord of Badenoch, to 
whose treachery he attributed the disclosure of his plans, 
in the church of the Grey Friars at Dumfries, and after 
the interchange of a few hot words struck him with his 
dagger to the ground. It was an outrage that admitted 
of no forgiveness, and Bruce for very safety was forced 
to assume the Crown six weeks after in the Abbey of 
Scone. The news roused Scotland again to arms, and 
summoned Edward to a fresh contest with his un- 
conquerable foe. But the murder of Comyn had changed 
the King’s mood toa terrible pitilessness. He threatened 
death against all concerned in the outrage, and exposed 
the Countess of Buchan, who had set the crown on 
Bruce’s head, in a cage or open chamber built for the 
purpose in one of the towers of Berwick. At the solemn 
feast which celebrated his son’s knighthood Edward 
vowed on the swan which formed the chief dish at the 
banquet to devote the rest of his days to exact vengeance ’ 
from the murderer himself. But even at the moment of 
the vow Bruce was already flying for his life to the 
western islands. ‘ Henceforth,’ he said to his wife at 
their coronation, “thou art Queen of Scotland and I 
King.” “I fear,” replied Mary Bruce, “we are only 
playing at royalty like children in their games.” The 
play was soon turned into bitter earnest. A small 
English force under Aymer de Valence sufficed to rout 
the disorderly levies which gathered round the new 
monarch, and the flight of Bruce left his followers at 
Edward’s mercy. Noble after noble was sent to the 
block. The Earl of Athole pleaded kindred with rovalty. 
“His only privilege,” burst forth the King, “shall be 
that of being hanged on a higher gallows than the rest.” 
Knights and priests were strung up side by side by the 
fneglish justiciaries; while the wife and daughters of 
Robert Bruce were flung into Edward’s prisons. Bruce 
himself had oftered to capitulate to Prince Edward. 


5OZ HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


But the offer only roused the old King to fury. “Who 
is so bold,” he cried, “as to treat with our traitors 
without our knowledge?” and rising from his sick bed 
he led his army northwards in the summer of 1307 to 
complete the conquest. But the hand of death was upon 
him, and in the very sight of Scotland the old man 
breathed his last at Burgh-upon-sands. 


BOOK IV. 
THE PARLIAMENT. 
1307—1461. 


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AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK IV. 


For Edward the Second we have three important contemporaries : 
Thomas de la More, Trokelowe’s Annals, and the life by a monk of 
Malmesbury, printed by Hearne. The sympathies of the first are with 
the King, those of the last two with the Barons. Murimuth’s short 
Chronicle is also contemporary. John Barbour’s “ Bruce,”’ the great 
legendary storehouse for his hero’s adventures, is historically worth- 
less. 

Important as it is, the reign of Edward the Third is by no means 
fortunate in its annalists. The concluding part of the Chronicle of 
Walter of Hemingford or Heminburgh seems to have been jotted down 
as news of the passing events reached its author: it ends at the battle 
of Crecy. Hearne has published another contemporary account, that 
of Robert of Avesbury, which closes in 1356. <A third account by 
Knyghton, a canon of Leicester, will be found in the collection of 
Twysden. At the end of this century and the beginning of the next 
the annals which had been carried on in the Abbey of St. Albans were 
thrown together by Walsingham in the ‘* Historia Anglicana’’? which 
bears his name, a compilation whose history may be found in the pref- 
aces to the ‘‘ Chronica Monasterii S. Albani’’ issued in the Rolls 
Series. An anonymous chronicler, whose work is printed in the 22d 
volume of the ‘‘ Archeologia,”’ has given us the story of the Good Par- 
liament, another account is preserved in the *‘Chronica Anglize from 
1328 to 1388,’’ published in the Rolls Series, and fresh light has been 
recently thrown on the time by the publication of a Chronicle by Adam 
of Usk which extends from 1377 to 1404. Fortunately the scantiness 
of historical narrative is compensated by the growing fulness and 
abundance of our State papers. Rymer’s Foedera is rich in diplomatic 
and other documents for this period, and from this time we have a 
storehouse of political and social information in the Parliamentary 
Rolls. 

For the French war itself our primary authority is the Chronicle of 
~ Jehan le Bel, a canon of the church of St. Lambert of Liége, who him- 
self served in Edward’s campaign against the Scots and spent the rest 
of his life at the court of John of Hainault. Up to the Treaty of Bre- 
tigny, where it closes, Froissart has done little more than copy this 
work, making, however, large additions from his own inquiries, espe- 
cially in the Flemish and Breton campaigns and in the account of 
Crecy. Froissart was himself a Hainaulter of Valenciennes ; he held 
a post in Queen Philippa’s household from 1361 to 1369, and under 
this influence produced in 1373 the first edition of his well-known 
Chronicle. A later edition is far less English in tone, and a third ver- 
sion, begun by him in his old age after long absence from England, is 
distinctly French in its sympathies. Froissart’s vivacity and pictur- 
esqueness blind us to the inaccuracy of his details ; as an historical 
authority he is of little value. The ‘‘ Fasciculi Zizaniorum”’ in the 
Rolls Series with the documents appended to it is a work of primary 

(395) 


356 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


authority for the history of Wyclif and his followers : a selection from 
his English tracts has been made by Mr. T. Arnold for the University 
of Oxford, which has also published his ‘‘ Trias.’’ The version of the 
Bible that bears his name has been edited with a valuable preface by 
the Rev. J. Forshall and Sir F. Madden. William Longland’s poem, 
“The Complaint of Piers the Ploughman’’ (edited by Mr. Skeat for 
the Early English Text Society), throws a flood of light on the social 
state of England after the Treaty of Bretigny. 

The ‘‘ Annals of Richard the Second and Henry the Fourth,’’ now 
published by the Master of the Rolls, are our main authority for the 
period which follows Edward’s death. They serve as the basis of the St. 
Alban’s compilation which bears the name of Walsingham, and from 
which the ‘‘ Life of Richard,’”’ by a monk of Evesham, is for the most 
part derived. The same violent Lancastrian sympathy runs through 
Walsingham and the fifth book of Knyghton’s Chronicle. The French 
authorities on the other hand are vehemently on Richard’s side. Frois- 
sart, who ends at this time, is supplemented by the metrical history of 
Creton (‘*S Archeologia,’”’ vol. xx.), and by the ‘* Chronique de la Traison 
et Mort de Richart’’ (English Historical Society), both works of French 
authors and published in France in the time of Henry the Fourth, 
probably with the aim of arousing French feeling against the House of 
Lancaster and the war-policy which it had revived. The popular feel- 
ing in England may be seen in ‘‘ Political Songs from Edward III. to 
Richard IIT.’’ (Rolls Series). A poem on ‘*‘ The Deposition of Richard 
II.’’ which has been published by the Camden Society is now ascribed 
to William Longland. 

With Henry the Fifth our historic materials become more abundant. 
We have the ‘‘ Acta Henrici Quinti’’ by Titus Livius, a chaplain in 
the royal army ; a life by Elmham, prior of Lenton, simpler in style 
but identical in arrangement and facts with the former work ; a biog- 
raphy by Robert Redman ; a metrical chronicle by Elmham (published 
in Rolls Series in ‘‘ Memorials of Henry the Fifth’’) ; and the meagre 
chronicles of Hardyng and Otterbourne. The King’s Norman cam- 
paigns may be studied in M. Puiseux’s ‘*Siége de Rouen” (Caen, 
1867). The ‘Wars of the English in France’? and Blondel’s work 
‘De Reductione Normanni” (both in Rolls Series) give ample in- 
formation on the military side of this and the next reign. But with 
the accession of Henry the Sixth we again enter on a period of singular 
dearth in its historical authorities. The ‘‘ Proces de Jeanne d’Are”’ 
(published by the Société de Histoire de France) is the only real au- 
thority for her history. For English affairs we are reduced to the 
meagre accounts of William of Worcester, of the Continuator of the 
Crowland Chronicle, and of Fabyan. Fabyan is a London alderman 
with a strong bias in favor of the House of Lancaster, and his work is 
useful for London only. The Continuator is one of the best of his 
class ; and though connected with the house of York, the date of his 
work, which appeared soon after Bosworth Field. makes him fairly 
impartial ; but he is sketchy and deficient in information. 'The more 
copious narrative of Polydore Vergil is far superior to these in literary 
ability, but of later date, and strongly Lanecastrian in tone, For the 
struggle between Edward and Warwick, the valuable narrative of ‘‘ The 
Arrival of Edward the Fonrth ”’ (Camden Society) may be taken as the 
official account on the royal side. The Paston Letters are the first in- 
stance in English history of a family correspondence, and throw he 
light on the social condition of the time. 


CHAPTER I. 
EDWARD I. 
1307—1327. 


In his calling together the estates of the realm Edward 
the First determined the course of English history. From 
the first moment of its appearance the Parliament be- 
came the centre of English affairs. The hundred years 
indeed which follow its assembly at Westminster saw 
its rise into a power which checked and overawed the 
Crown. 

Of the Kings in whose reigns the Parliament gathered 
this mighty strength not one was likely to look with in- 
difference on the growth of arival authority, and the 
bulk of them were men who in other times would have 
roughly checked it. What held their hand was the need 
of the Crown. The century and a half that followed the 
gathering of the estates at Westminster was a time of 
almost continual war, and of the financial pressure that 
springs from war. It was indeed war that had gathered 
them. In calling his Parliament Edward the First sought 
mainly an effective means of procuring supplies for that 
policy of national consolidation which had triumphed in 
Wales and which seemed to be triumphing in Scotland. 
But the triumph in Scotland soon proved a delusive one, 
and the strife brought wider strifes in its train. When 
Edward wrung from Balliol an acknowledgment of his 
suzerainty he foresaw little of the war with France, the 
war with Spain, the quarrel with the Papacy, the up- 
growth of social, of political, of religious revolution within 


England itself, of which that acknowledgment was to be 
(357) 


358 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the prelude. But the thicker troubles gathered round 
England the more the royal treasury was drained, and 
now that arbitrary taxation was impossible the one means 
of filling it lay ina summons of the Houses. ‘The Crown 
was chained to the Parliament by a tie of absolute need. 
From the first moment of parliamentary existence the 
life and power of the estates assembled at Westminster 
hung on the question of supplies. So long as war went 
on no ruler could dispense with the grants which fed the 
war and which Parliament alone could afford. But it 
was impossible to procure supplies save by redressing the 
grievances of which Parliament complained and by grant- 
ing the powers which Parliament demanded. It was in 
vain that King after King, conscious that war bound them 
to the Parliament, strove to rid themselves of the war. 
So far was the ambition of our rulers from being the cause 
of the long struggle that, save in the one case of Henry 
the Fifth, the desperate effort of every ruler was to arrive 
at peace. Forced as they were to fight, their restless di- 
plomacy strove to draw from victory as from defeat a 
means of escape from the strife that was enslaving the 
Crown. The royal Council, the royal favorites, were 
always onthe side of peace. But fortunately for English 
freedom peace was impossible. ‘The pride of the English 
people, the greed of France, foiled every attempt at ac-. 
commodation. The wisest ministers sacrificed themselves 
in vain. King after King patched up truces which never 
orew into treaties, and concluded marriages which brought 
fresh discord instead of peace. War went ceaselessly on, 
and with the march of war went on the ceaseless growth 
of the Parliament. 

The death of Edward the First arrested only for a mo- 
ment the advance of his army to the north. The Earl of 
Pembroke led it across the border, and found himself 
master of the country without a blow. Bruce’s career 
became that of a desperate adventurer, for even the High- 
land chiefs in whose fastnesses he found shelter were bit- 
terly hostile to one who claimed to be King of their foes 
in the Lowlands. It was this adversity that transformed 
the murderer of Comyn into the noble leader of a nation’s 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 359 


cause. Strong and of commanding presence, brave and 
genial in temper, Bruce bore the hardships of his career 
with a courage and hopefulness that never failed. In the 
legends that clustered round his name we see him listen- 
ing in Highland glens to the bay of the bloodhounds on 
his track, or holding a pass single-handed against a crowd 
of savage clansmen. Sometimes the small band which 
clung to him were forced to support themselves by hunt- 
ing and fishing, sometimes to break up for safety as their 
enemies tracked them to their lair. Bruce himself had 
more than once to fling off his coat-of-mail and scramble 
barefoot for very life up the crags. Little by little, how- 
ever, the dark sky cleared. The English pressure relaxed. 
James Douglas, the darling of Scottish story, was the first 
of the Lowland Barons to rally to the Bruce, and his 
daring gave heart to the King’s cause. Once he sur- 
prised his own house, which had been given to an English- 
man, ate the dinner which was prepared for its new 
owner, slew his captives, and tossed their bodies on to a 
pile of wood at the castle gate. Then he staved in the 
wine-vats that the wine might mingle with their blood, 
and set house and wood-pile on fire. 

A ferocity like this degraded everywhere the work of 
freedom; but the revival of the country went steadily 
on. Pembroke and the English forces were in fact par- 
alyzed by a strife which had broken out in England 
between the new King and his baronage. The moral 
purpose which had raised his father to grandeur was 
wholly wanting in Edward the Second; he was showy, 
idle, and stubborn in temper; but he was far from being 
destitute of the intellectual quickness which seemed in- 
born in the Plantagenets. He had no love for his father, 
but he had seen him in the later years of his reign 
struggling against the pressure of the baronage, evading 
his pledges as to taxation, and procuring absolution from 
his promise to observe the clauses added to the Charter. 
The son’s purpose was the same, that of throwing off 
what he looked on as the yoke of the baronage; but the 
means by which he designed to bring about his purpose 
was the choice of a minister wholly dependent on the 


56 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Crown. We have already noticed the change by which 
the “clerks of the King’s chapel,’ who had been the 
ministers of arbitrary government under the Norman and 
Angevin sovereigns, had been quietly superseded by the 
prelates and lords of the Continual Council. At the 
close of the late reign a direct demand on the part of the 
barons to nominate the great officers of state had been 
curtly rejected ; but the royal choice had been practically 
limited in the selection of its ministers to the class of 
prelates and nobles, and however closely connected with 
royalty they might be*such officers always to a great ex- 
tent shared the feelings and opinions of their order. The 
aim of the young King seems to have been to undo the 
change which had been silently brought about, and 
to imitate the policy of the contemporary sovereigns of 
France by choosing as his ministers men of an inferior 
position, wholly dependent on the crown for their power, 
and representatives of nothing but the policy and inter- 
ests of their master. Piers Gaveston, a foreigner sprung 
from a family of Guienne, had been his friend and com- 
panion during his father’s reign, at the close of which he 
had been banished from the realm for his share in in- 
trigues which divided Edward from his son. At the 
accession of the new king he was at once recalled, created 
Earl of Cornwall, and placed at the head of the adminis- 
tration. When Edward crossed the sea to wed Isabella 
of France, the daughter of Philip the Fair, a marriage 
planned by his father to provide against any further 
intervention of France in his difficulties with Scotland, 
the new minister was left as Regent in his room. The 
offence given by this rapid promotion was embittered by 
his personal temper. Gay, genial, thriftless, Gaveston 
showed in his first acts the quickness and audacity of 
Southern Gaul. The older ministers were dismissed, all 
claims of precedence or inheritance were set aside in the 
distribution of offices at the coronation, while taunts and 
defiances goaded the proud baronage to fury. The favor- 
ite was a fine soldier, and his lance unhorsed his oppo- 
nents in tourney after tourney. His reckless wit flung 
nicknames about the Court, the Earl of Lancaster was 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 361 


“the Actor,” Pembroke “the Jew,” Warwick “the 
Black Dog.” But taunt and defiance broke helplessly 
against the iron mass of the baronage. After a few 
months of power the formal demand of the Parliament 
for his dismissal could not be resisted, and in May, 1308, 
Gaveston was formally banished from the realm. 

But Edward was far from abandoning his favorite. In 
Ireland he was unfettered by the Baronage, and here 
Gaveston found a refuge as the King’s Lieutenant while 
Edward sought to obtain his recall by the intervention 
of France and the Papacy. But the financial pressure 
of the Scotch war again brought the King and his Par- 
hament together in the spring of 1809. It was only by 
conceding the rights which his father had sought to es- 
tablish of imposing import duties on the merchants by 
their own assent that he procured a subsidy. The firm- 
ness of the baronage sprang from their having found a 
head. In no point had the policy of Henry the Third 
more utterly broken down than in his attempt to weaken 
the power of the nobles by filling the great earldoms 
with kinsmen of the royal house. He had made Simon 
of Montfort his brother-in-law only to furnish a leader to 
the nation in the Barons’ war. In loading his second 
son, Edmund Crouchback, with honors and estates, he 
raised a family to greatness which overawed the Crown. 
Edmund had been created Earl of Lancaster; after 
Evesham he had received the forfeited Earldom of Lei- 
cester; he had been made Earl of Derby on the extinc- 
tion of the house of Ferrers. His son, Thomas of Lan- 
caster, was the son-in-law of Henry de Lacy, and was 
‘soon to add to these lordships the Earldom of Lincoln. 
And to the weight of these great baronies was added his 
royal blood. The father of Thomas had been a titular 
King of Sicily. His mother was dowager Queen of. Na- 
varre, his half-sister by the mother’s side was wife of the 
French King Philip le Bel and mother of the English 
Queen Isabella. He was himself a grandson of Henry 
the Third and not far from the succession of the throne. 
Had Earl Thomas been a wiser and a nobler man, his 
adhesion to the cause of the baronage might have guided 


362 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the King into a really national policy. As it was his 
weight proved irresistible. When Edward at the close 
of the Parliament recalled Gaveston the Earl of Lan- 
caster withdrew from the royal Council, and a Parliament 
which met in the spring of 1810 resolved that the affairs 
of the realm should be entrusted for a year to a body of 
twenty-one “ Ordainers”’ with Archbishop Winchelsey 
at their head. 

Edward with Gaveston withdrew sullenly to the North. 
A triumph in Scotland would have given him strength 
to baffle the Ordainers, but he had little of his father’s 
military skill, the wasted country made it hard to keep 
an army together, and after a fruitless campaign he fell 
back to his southern realm to meet the Parliament of 
1811 and the * Ordinances’ which the twenty-one laid 
before it. By this long and important statute Gaveston 
was banished, other advisers were driven from the Coun- 
cil, and the Florentine bankers whose loans had enabled 
Edward to hold the baronage at bay sent out of the 
realm. The customs duties imposed by Edward the First 
were declared to be illegal. Its administrative.provisions 
showed the relations which the barons sought to estab- 
lish between the new Parliament and the Crown. Par- 
liaments were to be called 2very year, and in these as- 
semblies the King’s servants were to be brought, if need 
were, to justice. The great officers of state were to be 
appointed with the counsei and consent of the baronage, 
and to be sworn in Parliament. ‘The same consent of 
the barons in Parliament was to be needful ere the King 
could declare war or absent himself from the realm. As 
the Ordinances show, the baronage still looked on Par- 
liament rather as a political organization of the nobles 
than as a gathering of the three Estates of the realm, 
The lower clergy pass unnoticed ; the Commons are re- 
garded as mere tax-payers whose part was still confined 
to the presentation of petitions of grievances and the 
grant of money. But even in this imperfect fashion the 
Parliament was a real representation of the country. 
The barons no longer depended for their force on the 
rise of some active leader, or gathered in exceptional 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 863 


assemblies to wrest reforms from the Crown by threat of 
war. ‘Their action was made regular and legal. Even 
the Commons took little part in forming decisions ; 
their force when formed hung on the assent of the knights 
and burgesses to them; and the grant which alone could 
purchase from the Crown the concessions which the 
Baronage demanded lay absolutely within the control of 
the Third Estate. It was this which made the King’s 
struggles so fruitless. He assented to the Ordinances, 
and then withdrawing to the North recalled Gaveston 
and annulled them. But Winchelsey excommunicated 
the favorite and the barons, gathering in arms, besieged 
him in Searborough. His surrender in May, 1312, ended 
the strife. The “ Black Dog” of Warwick had sworn that 
the favorite should feel his teeth: and Gaveston flung 
himself in vain at the feet of the Earl of Lancaster, 
praying for pity “from his gentle lord.” In defiance of 
the terms of his capitulation he was beheaded on Black- 
low Hill. 
The King’s burst of grief was as fruitless as his threats 
of vengeance; a feigned submission of the conquerors 
completed the royal humiliation, and the barons knelt 
before Edward in Westminster Hall to receive a pardon 
which seemed the death-blow of the royal power. Butif 
Edward was powerless to conquer the baronage he could 
still by evading the observances of the Ordinances throw 
the whole realm into confusion. The two years that 
follow Gaveston’s death are among the darkest in our 
history. A terrible succession of famines intensified the 
suffering which sprang from the utter absence of all rule 
as dissension raged between the barons and the King. 
At last a common peril drew both parties together. The 
Scots had profited by the English troubles, and Bruce’s 
‘“harrying of Buchan” after his defeat of its Earl, who 
had joined the English army, fairly turned the tide of 
success in his favor. Edinburgh, Roxburgh, Perth, and 
most of the Scotch fortresses fell one by one into King 
Robert’s hands. The clergy met in council and owned 
him as their lawful lord. Gradually the Scotch barons, 
who still held to the English cause, were coerced into 


364 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


submission, and Bruce found himself strong enough to 
invest Stirling, the last and the most important of the 
Scotch fortresses which held out for Edward, Stirling 
was in fact the key of Scotland, and its danger roused 
England out of its civil strife to an effort for the re- 
covery of its prey. At the close of 1813 Edward recog- 
nized the Ordinances, and a liberal grant from the Par- 
liament enabled him to take the field. Lancaster indeed 
still held aloof on the ground that the King had not 
sought the assent of Parliament to the war, but thirty 
thousand men followed Edward to the North, and a host 
of wild marauders were summoned from Ireland and 
Wales. The army which Bruce gathered to oppose this 
inroad was formed almost wholly of footmen, and was 
stationed to the south of Stirling on a rising ground 
flanked by a little brook, the Bannockburn, which gave 
its name to the engagement. ‘The battle took place on 
the twenty-fourth of June, 1814. Again two systems of 
warfare were brought face to face as they had been 
brought at Falkirk, for Robert like Wallace drew up his 
forces in hollow squares or circles of spearmen. ‘The 
English were dispirited at the very outset by the failure 
of an attempt to relieve Stirling and by the issue of 
a single combat between Bruce and Henry de Bohun, 
a knight who bore down upon him as he was riding 
peacefully along the front of his army. Robert was 
mounted ona small hackney and held only a light battle- 
axe in his hand, but warding off his opponent’s spear he 
cleft his skull with so terrible a blow that the handle of 
his axe was shattered in his grasp. At the opening of 
the battle the English archers were thrown forward to 
rake the Scottish squares, but they were without support 
and were easily dispersed by a handful of horse whom 
Bruce held in reserve for the purpose. The body of men- 
at-arms next flung themselves on the Scottish front, but 
their charge was embarrassed by the narrow space along 
which the line was forced to move, and the steady resist- 
ance of the squares soon threw the knighthood into dis- 
order. ‘The horses that were stickit,” says an exulting 
Scotch writer, “rushed and reeled right rudely.” In the 


THE PARLIAMENT. 13807—1461. 365 : 


moment of failure the sight of a body of camp-followers, 
whom they mistook for reinforcements to the enemy, 
spread panic through the English host. It broke in a 
headlong rout. Its thousands of brilliant horsemen were 
soon floundering in pits which guarded the level ground 
to Bruce’s left, or riding in wild haste for the border. 
Kew however were fortunate enough to reach it. Edward 
himself, with a body of five hundred knights, succeeded 
in escaping to Dunbar and the sea. But the flower of 
his knighthood fell into the hands of the victors, while 
the Irishry and the footmen were ruthlessly cut down by 
she country folk as they fled. For centuries to come the 
rich plunder of the English camp left its traces on the 
treasure-rolls and the vestment-rolls of castle and abbey 
throughout the Lowlands. 

Bannockburn left Bruce the master of Scotland: but 
terrible as the blow was England could not humble her- 
self to relinquish her claim on the Scottish crown. 
Edward was eager indeed for a truce, but with equal 
firmness Bruce refused all negotiation while the royal 
title was withheld from him and steadily pushed on the 
recovery of his southern dominions. His progress was 
unhindered. Bannockburn left Edward powerless, and 
Lancaster, at the head of the Ordainers, became supreme. 
But it was still impossible to trust the King or to act 
with him, and in the dead-lock of both parties the Scots 
plundered as they would. Their ravages in the North 
brought shame on England such as it had never known. 
As last Bruce’s capture of Berwick in the spring of 1518 
forced the King to give way. The Ordinances were for- 
mally accepted, an amnesty granted, and a small number 
of peers belonging to the barons’ party added to the great 
officers of state. Had a statesman been at the head of 
the baronage the weakness of Edward might have now 
been turned to good purpose. But the character of the 
Earl of Lancaster seems to have fallen far beneath the 
greatness of his position. Distrustful of his cousin, yet 
himself incapable ot governing, he stood sullenly aloot 
from the royal Council aud the royal armies, and Edward 
was able to lay his failure in recovering Berwick during 


366 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the campaign of 1319 to the Earl’s charge. His influence 
over the country was sensibly weakened ; and in this 
weakness the new advisers on whom the king was lean- 
ing saw a hope of destroying his power. These were a 
younger and elder Hugh Le Despenser, son and grandson 
of the Justiciar who had fallen beside Earl Simon at 
Evesham. Greedy and ambitious as they may have been, 
they were able men, and their policy was of a higher 
stamp than the wilful defiance of Gaveston. It lay, if 
we may gather it from the faint indications which remain, 
in a frank recognition of the power of the three Estates 
as opposed to the separate action of the baronage. The 
rise of the younger Hugh, on whom the King bestowed 
the county of Glamorgan with the hand of one of its 
coleiresses, a daughter of Earl Gilbert of Gloucester, 
was rapid enough to excite general jealousy ; and in 1321 
Lancaster found little difficulty in extorting by force of 
arms his exile from the kingdom. But the tide of popular 
sympathy was already wavering, and it was turned to 
the royal cause by an insult offered to the Queen, against 
whom Lady Badlesmere closed the doors of Ledes Castle. 
The unexpected energy shown by Edward in avenging 
this insult gave fresh strength to his cause. At the open- 
ing of 1822 he found himself strong enough to recall De- 
spenser, and when Lancaster convoked the baronage to 
force him again into exile, the weakness of their party was 
shown by some negotiations into which the Earl entered 
with the Scots and by his precipitate retreat to the north 
on the advance of the royal army. At Boroughbridge his 
forces were arrested and dispersed, and Thomas himself, 
brought captive before Edward at Pontefract, was tried 
and condemned to death as a traitor. ‘“ Have mercy on 
me, King of Heaven,” cried Lancaster, as, mounted on 
a gray pony without a bridle, he was hurried to execu- 
tion, ‘ for my earthly King has forsaken me.” His death 
was followed by that of a number of his adherents and 
by the captivity of others; while a Parliament at York 
annulled the proceeding against the Despensers and re- 
-pealed the Ordinances. 
Itis to this Parliament, however, and perhaps to the vic- 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1807—1461. 867 


torious confidence of the royalists, that we owe the famous 
provisions which reveals the policy of the Despensers, the 
provision that all laws concerning “the estate of our 
Lord the King and his heirs or for the estate of the realm 
and the people shall be treated, accorded, and established 
in Parliaments by our Lord the King and by the consent 
of the prelates, earls, barons, and commonalty of the realm 
according as hath been hitherto accustomed.” It would 
seem from the tenor of this remarkable enactment that 
much of the sudden revulsion of popular feeling had been 
owing to the assumption of all legislative action by the 
baronage alone. ‘The same policy was seen in a reissue 
in the form of a royal Ordinance of some of the most 
beneficial provisions of the Ordinances which had been 
formally repealed. But the arrogance of the Despensers 
gave new offence; and the utter failure ofa fresh cam- 
paign against Scotland again weakened the Crown. The 
barbarous forays in: which the borderers under Earl 
Douglas were wasting Northumberland woke a general 
indignation; and a grant from the Parliament at York 
enabled Edward to march with a great army to the North. 
But Bruce as of old declined an engagement till the 
wasted Lowlands starved the invaders into a ruinous re- 
treat. The failure forced England in the spring of 1323 
to stoop to a truce for thirteen years, in the negotiation of 
which Bruce was suffered to take the royal title. Wesee 
in this act of the Despensers the first of a series of such 
attempts by which minister after minister strove to free 
the Crown from the bondage under which the war-pressure 
laid it to the growing power of Parliament ; but it ended 
as these after-attempts ended, only in the ruin of the coun- 
sellors who planned it. The pride of the country had 
been roused by the struggle, and the humiliation of such a 
truce robbed the Crown of its temporary popularity... It 
led the way to the sudden catastrophe which closed this 
disastrous reign. 

In his struggle with the Scots Edward, like his father. = 
had been hampered not only by internal divisions but by 
ihe harassing intervention of France. The rising under 
Bruce had been backed by French aid as well as by a 


868 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


revival of the old quarrel over Guienne, and on the 
accession of Charles the Fourth in 1322 a demand of 
homage for Ponthieu and Gascony called Edward over 
sea. But the Despensers dared not let him quit the realm, 
aud a fresh dispute as to the right of possession in the 
Agenois brought about the seizure of the bulk of Gascony 
by a sudden attack on the part of the French, The 
quarrel verged upon open war, and to close it Edward’s 
Queen, Isabella, a sister of the French King, undertook 
in 1325 to revisit her home and bring about a treaty of 
peace between the two countries. Isabella hated the 
Despensers ; she was alienated from her husband; but 
hatred and alienation were as yet jealously concealed. 
At the close of the year the terms of peace seemed to be 
arranged ; and though declining to cross the sea, Edward 
evaded the difficulty created by the demand for personal 
homage by investing his son with the Duchies of 
Aquitaine and Gascony, and despatching him to join his 
mother at Paris. The boy did homage to King Charles 
for the two Duchies, the question of the Agenois being 
reserved for legal decision, and Edward at once recalled 
his wife and son to England. Neither threats nor prayers 
however could induce either wife or child to return to his 
court. Roger Mortimer, the most powerful of the Marcher 
barons and a deadly foe to the Despensers, had taken 
refuge in France; and his influence over the Queen made 
her the centre of a vast conspiracy. With the young 
Edward in her hands she was able to procure soldiers 
from the Count of Hainault by promising her son’s hand 
to his daughter; the Italian bankers supplied funds, and 
after a year’s preparation the Queen set sail in the 
autumn of 1326. A secret conspiracy of the baronage 
was revealed when the primate and nobles hurried to her 
standard on her landing at Orwell. Deserted by all, and 
repulsed by the citizens of London whose aid he implored, 
the King fled hastily to the west and embarked with the 
Despensers for Lundy Island, which Despenser had forti- 
fied as a possible refuge; but contrary winds flung him 
again on the Welsh coast, where he fell into the hands of 
Earl Henry of Lancaster, the brother of the Earl whom 
they had slain. The younger Despenser, who accom- 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 369 


panied him, was at once hung on a gibbet fifty feet high, 
and the King placed in ward at Kenilworth till his fate 
could be decided by a Parliament summoned for that pur- 
pose at Westminster in January, 1327. 

The peers who assembled fearlessly revived the con- 
stitutional usage of the earlier English freedom, and 
asserted their right to depose a King who had proved 
himself unworthy to rule. Not a voice was raised in 
Edward’s behalf, and only four prelates ‘protested when. 
the young Prince was proclaimed King by acclamation 
and presented as their sovereign to the multitudes with- 
out. The revolution took legal form in a bill which 
charged the captive monarch with indolence, incapacity, 
the loss of Scotland, the violation of his coronation oath 
and oppression of the Church and baronage; and on the 
approval of this it was resolved that the reign of Edward 
of Caernarvon had ceased and that the crown had passed 
to his son, Edward of Windsor A deputation of the 
Parliament proceeded to Kenilworth to procure the as- 
sent of the discrowned King to his own deposition, and 
Edward, “clad in a plain black gown,” bowed quietly to 
his fate. Sir William Trussel at once addressed him in 
words which better than any other mark the nature of 
the step which the Parliament had taken. “I, William 
Trussel, proctor of the earls, barons, and others, having 
for this full and sufficient power, do render and give back 
to you, Edward, once King of England, the homage and 
fealty of the persons named in my procuracy ; and acquit 
and discharge them thereof in the best manner that law 
and custom will give. And I now make protestation in 
their name that they will no longer be in your fealty 
and allegiance, nor claim to hold anything of you as 
king, but will account you hereafter as a private person 
without any manner of royal dignity.” <A significant act 
followed these emphatic words. Sir Thomas Blount, the 
steward of the household, broke his staff of office, a 
ceremony used only at a king’s death, and declared that 
all persons engaged in the royal service were discharged. 
The act of Blount was only an omen of the fate which 
awaited the miserable King. In the following September 
he was murdered in Berkeley Castle. 


CHAPTER IL. 
EDWARD THE THIRD. 
1827—13847. 


THE deposition of Edward the Second proclaimed to 
the world the power which the English Parliament had 
gained. In thirty years from their first assembly at 
Westminster the Estates had wrested from the Crown 
the last relic of arbitrary taxation, had forced on it new 
ministers and a new system of government, had claimed 
a right of confirming the choice of its councillors and of 
punishing their misconduct, and had established the 
principle that redress of grievances precedes a grant of 
supply. Nor had the time been less important in the 
internal growth of Parliament. Step by step the prac- 
tical sense of the Houses themselves completed the 
work of Edward by bringing about change after change 
in its composition. The very division into a House of 
Lords and a House of Commons formed no part of the 
original plan of Edward the First ; in the earlier Parlia- 
ments each of the four orders of clergy, barons, knights, 
and burgesses mef, deliberated, and made their grants 
apart from each other. This isolation, however, of the 
Estates soon showed signs of breaking down. Though 
the clergy held steadily aloof from any real union with 
its fellow-orders, the knights of the shire were drawn by 
the similarity of their social position into a close con- 
nexion with the lords. They seem in fact to have been 
soon admitted by the baronage to an almost equal posi- 
tion with themselves, whether as legislators or counsel- 
lors of the Crown. The burgesses on the other hand 

(370) 


. 
~~ 


THE PARLIAMENT, 1307—1461., OTL 


took little part at first in Parliamentary proceedings, 
save in those which related to the taxation of their class. 
But their position was raised by the strifes of the reign 
of Edward the Second when their aid was needed by the 
baronage in its struggle with the Crown; and their right 
to share fully in all legislative action was asserted in the 

statute of 1322. From this moment no proceedings can 
oe been fe edored as formally legislative save those 
conducted in full Parliament of all the estates. In sub- 
jects of public policy, however, the barons were still 
regarded as the sole advisers of the Crown, though the 
knights of the shire were sometimes consulted with them. 
But the barons and knighthood were not fated to be 
drawn into a single body whose weight would have given 
an aristocratic impress to the constitution. Gradually, 
through causes with which we are imperfectly acquainted, 
the knights of the shire drifted from their older con- 
nexion with the baronage into so close and intimate a 
union with the representatives of the towns that at the 
opening of the reign of Edward the Third the two orders 
are found grouped formally together, under the name of 
“The Commons.’ It is difficult to over-estimate the 
importance of this change. Had Parliament remained 
broken up into its four orders of clergy, barons, knights, 
and citizens, its power would have been neutralized at 
every great crisis by the jealousies and difficulty of co- 
operation among its component parts. A permanent 
union of the knighthood and the baronage on the other 
hand would have converted Parliament into the mere 
representative of an aristocratic caste, and would have 
robbed it of the strength which it has drawn from its 
connexion with the great body of the commercial classes. 
The new attitude of the knighthood, their social con- 
nexion as landed gentry with the baronage, their polit- 
ical union with the burgesses, really welded the three 
orders into one, and gave that unity of feeling and action 
to our Parliament on which its power has ever since 
mainly depended. 

The weight of the two Houses was seen in their settle- 
ment of the new government by the nomination of a 


Sod 


S12 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Council with Earl Henry of Lancaster at its head. The 
Council had at once to meet fresh difficulties in the North. 
The truce so recently made ceased legally with Edward’s 
deposition; and the withdrawal of his royal title in 
further offers of peace warned Bruce of the new temper 
of the English rulers. Troops gathered on either side, 
and the English Council sought to pave the way for an 
attack by dividing Scotland against itself. Edward 
Balliol, a son of the former King John, was solemnly 
received as a vassal-king of Scotland atthe English court. 
Robert was disabled by leprosy from taking the field in 
person, but the insult roused him to hurl his marauders 
again over the border under Douglas and Sir Thomas 
Randolph. The Scotch army has been painted for us by 
an eye-witness, whose description is embodied in the work 
of Jehan le Bel. ‘“ It consisted of fourthousand men-at- 
arms, knights, and esquires, well mounted, besides twenty 
thousand men bold and hardy, armed after the manner of 
their country, and mounted upon little hackneys that are 
never tied up or dressed, but turned immediately after 
the day’s march to pasture on the heath or in the fields. 
... They bring no carriages with them on account of the 
mountains they have to pass in Northumberland, neither 
do they carry with them any provisions of bread or wine, 
for their habits of sobriety are such in time of war that 
they will live fora long time on flesh half-sodden without 
bread, and drink the river water without wine. They 
liave therefore no occasion for pots or pans, for they dress 
the flesh of the cattle in their skins after they have flayed 
them, and being sure to find plenty of them in the coun- 
try which they invade they carry none with them. Un- 
der the flaps of his saddle each man carries a broad piece 
of metal, behind him a little bag of oatmeal: when they 
have eaten too much of the sodden flesh and their stom- 
ach appears weak and empty, they set this plate over 
the fire, knead the meal with water, and when the plate 
is hot put a little of the paste upon it in a thin cake like 
a biscuit, which they eat to warm their stomachs. It is 
therefore no wonder that they perform a longer day’s 
march than other soldiers. Though twenty thousand 


THE PARLIAMENT. 13807—1461. 373 


horsemen and forty thousand foot marched under their 
boy-king to protect the border, the English troeps were 
utterly helpless against such a foe as this. At one time 
the whole army lost its way in the border wastes; at 
another all traces of the enemy disappeared, and an offer 
of knighthood and a hundred marks was made to any 
who could tell where the Scots were encamped. But 
when they were found their position behind the Wear 
proved unassailable, and after a bold sally on the English | 
camp Douglas foiled an attempt at intercepting him ‘by a 
clever retreat. The English levies broke hopelessly up, 
and a fresh foray into Northumberland forced the English 
Court in 1328to submit to peace. By the treaty of North- 
ampton, which was solemnly confirmed by Parliament in 
September, the independence of Scotland was recognized, 
and Robert Bruce owned as its King. Edward formally 
adandoned his claim of feudal superiority over Scotland ; 
while Bruce promised to make compensation for the 
damage done in the North, to marry his son David to 
Edward’s sister Joan, and to restore their forfeited estates 
to those nobles who had sided with the English King. 
But the pride of England had been too much roused 
by the struggle with the Scots to bear this defeat easily, 
and the first result of the treaty of Northampton was the 
overthrow of the government which concluded it. This 
result was hastened by the pride of Roger Mortimer, who 
was now created Earl of March, and who had made him- 
self supreme through his influence over Isabella and his 
exclusion of the rest of the nobles from all practical 
share in the administration of the realm. The first efforts 
to shake Roger’s power were unsuccessful. The Earl of 
Lancaster stood, like his brother, at the head of the 
baronage; the parliamentary settlement at Edward’s 
accession had placed him first in the royal Council; and 
it was to him that the task of defying Mortimer naturally 
fell. At the close of 1328, ther efore, Earl Henry formed 
a league with the Archbishop of Canterburv and with the 
young King’s uncles, the Earls of Norfolk and Kent, to 
bring Mortimer to account for the peace with Scotland 
and the usurpation of the government as well as for the 


874 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


late King’s murder, a murder which had been the work 
of his private partizans and which had profoundly 
shocked the general conscience. But the young King 
clave firmly to his mother, the Earls of Norfolk and Kent 
deserted to Mortimer, and powerful as it seemed the 
league broke up without result. A feeling of insecurity 
however spurred the Earl of March to a bold stroke at 
his opponents. The Earl of Kent, who was persuaded 
that his brother, Edward the Second, still lived a prisoner 
in Corfe Castle, was arrested on a charge of conspiracy 
to restore him to the throne, tried before a Parliament 
filled with Mortimer’s adherents, and sent to the block. 
But the death of a prince of the royal blood roused the 
young King to resentment of the greed and arrogance of 
a minister who treated Edward himself as little more than 
a state-prisoner. A few months after his uncle’s execu- 
tion the King entered the Council chamber in Notting- 
ham Castle with a force which he had introduced 
through a secret passage in the rock on which it stands, 
and arrested Mortimer with his own hands. A Parlia- 
ment which was at once summoned condemned the Earl 
of March to a traitor’s death, and in November, 1330, he 
was beheaded at Tyburn, while the Queen-mother was 
sent for the rest of her lfe into confinement at Castle 
Rising. 

Young as he was, and he had only reached his eighteenth 
year, Edward at once assumed the control of affairs. His 
first care was to restore good order throughout the coun- 
try, which under the late government had fallen into 
ruin, and to free his hands by a peace with France for 
further enterprises in the North. A formal peace had 
been concluded by Isabella after her husband’s fall; but 
the death of Charles the Fourth soon brought about new 
jealousies between the two courts. The three sons of 
Philip the Fair had followed him on the throue in suc- 
cession, but all had now died without male issue, and 
Isabella, as Philip’s daughter, claimed the crown for her 
son. The claim in any case was a hard one to make out. 
Though her brothers had left no sons, they had left 
daughters, and if female succession were admitted these 


THE PARLIAMENT, 1307—1461. 375 


daughters of Philip’s sons would precede a son of Philip’s 
daughter. Isabella met this difficulty by a contention 
that though females could transmit the right of succes- 
sion they could not themselves possess it, and that her 
son, as the nearest living male descendant of Philip the 
Fair, and born in the lifetime of the King from whom he 
claimed, could claim in preference to females who were 
related to Philip in as near a degree. But the bulk of 
French jurists asserted that only male succession gave 
right to the French throne. On such a theory the right 
inheritable from Philip the Fair was exhausted ; and the 
crown passed to the son of Philip’s younger brother, 
Charles of Valois, who in fact peacefully mounted the 
throne as Philip the Fifth. Purely formal as the claim 
which Isabella advanced seems to have been, it revived 
the irritation between the two courts, and though 
Edward's obedience to a summons which Philip addressed 
to him to do homage for Aquitaine brought about an 
agreement that both parties should restore the gains they 
had made since the last ¢reaty the agreement was never 
carried out. Fresh threats of war ended in the con- 
clusion of a new treaty of peace, but the question whether 
liege or simple homage was due for the duchies remained 
unsettled when the fall of Mortimer gave the young King 
full mastery of affairs. His action was rapid and decisive. 
Clad as a merchant, and with but fifteen horsemen at his 
back, Edward suddenly made his appearance in 1331 at 
the French court and did homage as fully as Philip re- 
quired. The question of the Agenois remained unsettled, 
though the English Parliament insisted that its decision 
should rest with negotiation and not with war, but on 
all other points a complete peace was made; and the 
young King rode back with his hands free for an attack 
which he was planning on the North. 

The provisions of the Treaty of Northampton for 
the restitution of estates had never been fully carried 
out. Till this was done the English court held that the 
rights of feudal superiority over Scotland which it: had 
yielded in the treaty remained in force; and at this mo- 
ment an opening seemed to present itself for again assert- 


376 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


ing these rights with success. Fortune seemed at last to 
have veered to the English side. ‘The death of Robert 
Bruce only a year after the Treaty of Northampton left 
the Scottish throne to his son David, a child of but eight 
years old. The death of the King was followed by the 
loss of Randolph and Douglas; and the internal diffieul- 
ties of the realm broke out in civil strife. To the great 
barons on either side the border the late peace involved 
serious losses, for many of the Scotch houses held large 
estates in England as many of the, English lords held 
large estates in Scotland, and although the treaty had 
provided for their claims they had in each ease been 
practically set aside. It is this discontent of the barons 
at the new settlement which explains the sudden success 
of Edward Balliol in a snatch which he made at the 
Scottish throne. Balliol’s design was known at the Eng- 
lish court, where he had found shelter for some years ; 
and Edward, whether sincerely or no, forbad his barons 
from joining him and posted troops on the border to hin- 
der his crossing it. But Balliokfound little difficulty in 
making his attack by sea. He sailed from England at 
the head of a body of nobles who claimed estates in the 
north, landed in August 1832 on the shores of Fife, and 
after repulsing with immense loss an army which attack- 
ed him near Perth was crowned at Scone two months 
after his landing, while David Bruce fled helplessly to 
France. Edward had given no open aid to this enter- 
prise, but the crisis tempted his ambition, and he de- 
manded and obtained from Balliol an acknowledgment 
of the English suzerainty. The acknowledgment how- 
ever was fatal to Balliol himself. Surprised at Annan 
by a party of Scottish nobles, their sudden attack drove 
him in December over the border after a reign of but 
five months; and Berwick, which he had agreed to sur- 
render to Edward, was strongly garrisoned against an 
English attack. The sudden breakdown of his vassal- 
king left Edward face to face with a new Scotch war. The 
Parliament which he summoned to advise on the enforce- 
ment of his claim showed no wish to plunge again into 
the contest, and met him only with evasions and delays. 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 37T 


But Edward had gone too far to withdraw. In March 
1333, he appeared before Berwick, and besieged the town. 
A Scotch army under the regent, Sir Archibald Douglas, 
brother to the famous Sir James, advanced to its relief 
in July and attacked a covering force which was en- 
camped on the strong position of Halidon Hill. The 
English bowmen however vindicated the fame they had 
first won at Falkirk, and were soon to crown in the vic- 
tory of Crecy. The Scotch only struggled through the 
marsh which covered the English front to be riddled 
with a storm of arrows and tc break in utter rout. The 
battle decided the fate of Berwick. From that time the 
town has remained English territory. It was in fact the 
one part of Edward’s conquests which was preserved in 
the end by the English crown. But fragment as it was, 
it was always viewed legally as representing the realm 
of which it once formed a part. As Scotland, it had its 
chancellor, chamberlain, and other officers of State: 
and the peculiar heading of Acts of Parhament enacted 
for England “and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed ” 
still preserves the memory of its peculiar position. But 
the victory did more than give Berwick to England. 
The defeat of Douglas was followed by the submission 
of a large part of the Scotch nobles, by the flight of the 
boy-king David, and by the return of Balliol unopposed 
to the throne. Edward exacted a heavy price for his 
aid. All Scotland south of the Firth of Forth was ceded 
to England, and Balliol did homage as vassal-king for 
the rest. 

It was at the moment of this submission that the young 
King reached the climax of his success. <A king at four- 
teen, a father at seventeen, he had carried out at eight- 
een a political revolution in the overthrow ‘of Mortimer, 
and restored at twenty-two the ruined work of hisegrand 
father. ‘The northern frontier was carried to its old line 
under the Northumbrian kings. His kingdom within 
was peaceful and orderly; and the strife with France 
seemed at an end. During the next three years Edward 
persisted in the line of policy he had adopted, retaining 
his hold over Southern Scotland, aiding his sub-king 


378 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Balliol in campaign after campaign against the despairing 
efforts of the nobles who still adhered to the house of 
Bruce, a party who were now headed by Robert the 
Steward of Scotland and by Earl Randolph of Moray. 
His perseverance was all but crowned with success, 
when Scotland was again saved by the intervention of 
France. Thesuccess of Edward roused anew the jeal- 
ousy of the French court. David Bruce found a refuge 
with Philip; French ships appeared off the Scotch coast 
and brought aid to the patriot nobles; and the old legal 
questions about the Agenois and Aquitaine were mooted 
afresh by the French council. Fora time Edward staved 
off the contest by repeated embassies; but his refusal to 
accept Philip as a mediator between England and the 
Scots stirred France to threats of war. In 1385 fleets 
gathered on its coast ; descents were made on the English 
shores ; and troops and galleys were hired in Italy and 
the north for an invasion of England. The mere threat 
of war saved Scotland. Edward’s forces there were 
drawn to the south to meet the looked for attack from 
across the Channel; and the patriot party, freed from 
their pressure, at once drew together again. The actual 
declaration of war against France at the close of 1337 
was the knell of Balliol’s greatness; he found himself 
without an adherent and withdrew two years later to the 
court of Edward, while David returned to his kingdom in 
1542 and won back the chief fastnesses of the Lowlands. 
From that moment the freedom of Scotland was secured. 
From a war of conquest and patriotic resistance the 
struggle died into a pretty strife between two angry 
neighbors, which became a mere episode in the larger 
contest which it had stirred between England and 
I’rance. 

Whether in its national or in its European bearings it. 
is difficult to over-estimate the importance of the contest 
which was now to open between these two nations. To 
England it brought a social, a religious, and in the end 
a political revolution. The Peasant Revolt, Lollardry, 
and the New Monarchy were direct issues of the Hundred 
Years’ War. Withit began the military renown of Eng- 


THE PARLIAMENT, 1307.—1461. 3T9 


land; with it opened her struggle for the mastery of the 
seas. The pride begotten by great victories and a sud- 
den revelation of warlike prowess roused the country 
not only to a new ambition, a new resolve to assert itself 
as a European power, but to a repudiation of the claims 
of the Papacy and an assertion of the ecclesiastical inde- 
pendence both of Church and Crown which paved the 
way for and gave its ultimate form to the English Refor- 
mation. The particular shape which English warfare 
assumed, the triumph of the yeoman and archer over 
noble and knight, gave new force to the political advance 
of the Commons. On the other hand the misery of the 
‘war produced the first great open feud between labor and 
capital. The glory of Crecy or Poitiers was dearly 
bought by the upgrowth of English pauperism. The 
warlike temper nursed on foreign fields begot at home a 
new turbulence and scorn of law, woke a new feudal 
spirit in the baronage, and sowed in the revolution which 
placed a new house on the throne the seeds of that fatal 
strife over the succession which troubled England to the 
days of Elizabeth. Nor was the contest of less import 
in the history of France. If it struck her for the mo- 
ment from her height of pride, it raised her in the end 
to the front rank among the states of Europe. It carried 
her boundaries to the Rhone and the Pyrenees. It 
wrecked alike the feudal power of her noblesse and the 
hopes of constitutional liberty which might have sprung 
from the emancipation of the peasant or the action of the 
burgher. It confounded a royal despotism which reached 
its height in Richelieu and finally plunged France into 
the gulf of the Revolution. 

Of these mighty issues little could be foreseen at the 
moment when Philip and Edward declared war. But 
from the very first the war took European dimensions. 
The young King saw clearly the greater strength of 
France. ‘The weakness of the Empire, the captivity of 
the Papacy at Avignon, left her without a rival among 
European powers. The French chivalry was the envy 
of the world, and its military fame had just been 
heightened by a victory over the Flemish communes at 


380 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Cassel. In numbers, in wealth, the French people faz 
surpassed their neighbors over the Channel. England 
can hardly have counted more than four millions of 
inhabitants, France boasted of twenty. The clinging of 
our kings to their foreign dominions is explained by the 
fact that their subjects in Gascony, Aquitaine, and Poitou 
must have equalled in number their subjects in England. 
There was the same disproportion in the wealth of the 
two countries and, as men held then, in their military re 
sources. Edward could bring only eight thousand men. 
at-arms to the field. Philip, while a third of his force 
was busy elsewhere, could appear at the head of forty 
thousand. Of the revolution in warfare which was to 
reverse this superiority, to make the footman rather than 
the horseman the strength of an army, the world and 
even the English King, in spite of Falkirk and Halidon, 
as yet recked little. Edward’s whole energy was bent 
on meeting the strength of France by a coalition of 
powers against her, and his plans were helped by the 
dread which the great feudatories of the empire who lay 
nearest to him, the Duke of Brabant, the Counts of 
Hainault and Gelders, the Markgrave of Juliers, felt of 
French annexation. ‘They listened willingly enough to 
his offers. Sixty thousand crowns purchased the alliance 
of Brabant. Lesser subsidies bought that of the two 
counts and the Markerave. The King’s work was helped 
indeed by his domestic relations. The Count of Hain- 
ault was Edward’s father-in-law ; he was also the father- 
in-law of the Count of Gelders. But the marriage of 
a third of the Count’s daughters brought the English 
King a more important ally. She was wedded to the 
Emperor, Lewis of Bavaria, and the connexion that thus 
existed between the English .and Imperial Courts facili- 
tated the negotiations which ended in a formal alliance. 
But the league had amore solid ground. The Em- 
peror, like Edward, had his strife with France. His 
strife sprang from the new position of the Papacy. The 
removal of the Popes to Avignon which followed on the 
quarrel of Boniface the Eighth with Philip Je Bel, and the 
subjection to the French court which resulted from it, af- 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 381 


fected the whole state of European politics. In the ever- 
recurring contest between the Papacy and the Empire 
France had of old been the lieutenant of the Roman See. 
But with the settlement at Avignon the relation changed, 
and the Pope became the lieutenant of France. Instead 
of the Papacy using the French Kings in its war of ideas 
against the Empire the French Kings used the Papacy as 
an instrument in their political rivalry with the Emperors. 
But if the position of the Pope drew Lewis to the side of 
England, it had much to do with drawing Edward to the 
side of Lewis. It was this that made the alliance, fruit- 
less as it proved in a military sense, so memorable in its 
religious results. Hitherto England had been mainly on 
the side of the Popes in their strife against the Emperors. 
Now that the Pope had become a tool in the hands of a 
power which was to be its great enemy, the country was 
driven to close alliances with the Empire and to an ever- 
srowing alienation from the Roman See. In Scotch affairs 
the hostility of the Popes had been steady and vexatious 
ever since Edward the First’s time, and from the moment 
that this fresh struggle commenced they again showed 
their French partizanship. When Lewis made a last 
appeal for peace, Philipof Valois made Benedict XII. lay’ 
down as a condition that the Emperor should form no 
alliance with an enemy of France. The quarrel of both 
England and Germany with the Papacy at once grew 
ripe. The German Diet met to declare that the Imperial 
power came from God alone, and that the choice of an 
Emperor needed no Papal confirmation, while Benedict 
replied by a formal excommunication of Lewis. England 
on the other hand entered on a religious revolution when 
she stood hand in hand with an excommunicated power. 
It was significant that though worship ceased in Flanders 
on the Pope’s interdict, the English priests who were 
brought over set the interdict at naught. 

The negotiation of this alliance occupied the whole of 
1337 ; it ended in a promise of the Emperor on payment 
of 3,000 gold florins to furnish two thousand men-at- 
arms. In the opening of 1338 an attack of Philip on 
the Agenois forced Edward into open war. His profuse 


382 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. — 


expenditure however brought little fruit. Though Ed- 
ward crossed to Antwerp in the summer, the year was 
spent in nogotiations with the princes of the Lower 
Rhine and in an interview with the Emperor at Coblentz, 
where Lewis appointed him Vicar-General of the Emperor 
for all territories on the left bank of the Rhine. The 
occupation of Cambray, an Imperial fief, by the French 
King gave a formal ground for calling the princes of 
this district to Edward’s standard. But already the 
great alliance showed signs of yielding. Edward, uneasy 
at his connexion with an Emperor under the ban of the 
Church and harassed by vehement remonstrances from — 
the Pope, entered again into negotiations with France in 
the winter of 1838; and Lewis, alarmed in his turn, 
listened to fresh overtures from Benedict, who held out 
vague hopes of reconciliation, while he threatened a 
renewed excommunication if Lewis persisted in invading 
France. The non-arrival of the English subsidy decided 
the Emperor to take no personal part in the war, and 
the attitude of Lewis told on the temper of Edward’s 
German allies. Though all joined him in the summer 
of 1339 on his formal summons of them as Vicar-General 
‘of the Empire, and his army when it appeared before 
Cambray numbered forty thousand men, their ardor 
cooled as the town held out. Philip approached it from 
the south, and on Edward’s announcing his resolve to 
cross the river and attack him he was at once deserted 
by the two border princes who had most to lose from a 
contest with France, the Counts of Hainault and Namur. 
But the King was still full of hope. He pushed forward 
to the country round St. Quentin between the head 
waters of the Somme and the Oise with the purpose of 
forcing a decisive engagement. But he found Philip 
strongly encamped, and declaring their supplies ex- 
hausted his allies at once called for a retreat. It was in 
vain that Edward moved slowly for a week along the 
French border. Philip’s position was too strongly guarded 
by marshes and entrenchments to be attacked, and at 
last the allies would stay no longer. At the news that 
the French King had withdrawn to the south the whole 
army in turn fell back upon Brussels. 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 383 


The failure of the campaign dispelled the hopes which 
Edward had drawn from his alliance with the Empire. 
With the exhaustion of his subsidies the princes of the 
Low Countries became inactive. The Duke of Brabant 
became cooler in his friendship. The Emperor himself, 
still looking to an accommodation with the Pope and 
justly jealous of Edward’s own intrigues at Avignon, 
wavered and at last fell away. But though the alliance 
ended in disappointment it had given a new impulse tothe 
erudge against the Papacy which began with its ex- 
tortions in the reign of Henry the Third. The hold of 
Rome on the loyalty of England was sensibly weakening. 
Their transfer from the Eternal City to Avignon robbed 
the Popes of half the awe which they had inspired among 
Englishmen. Not only did it bring them nearer and 
more into the light of common day, but it dwarfed them 
into mere agents of French policy. The old bitterness 
at their exactions was revived by the greed to which they 
were driven through their costly efforts to impose a 
French and Papal Emperor on Germany as well as to 
secure themselves in their new capital on the Rhone. 
The mighty building, half fortress, half palace, which 
still awes the traveller at Avignon has played its part 
in our history. Its erection was to the rise of Lollardry 
what the erection of St. Peter’s was to the rise of Luther- 
anism. Its massive walls, its stately chapel, its chambers 
glowing with the frescoes of Simone Memmi, the garden 
which covered its roof with a strange verdure, called 
year by year for fresh supplies of gold; and for this as 
for the wider and costlier schemes of Papal policy gold 
could be got only by pressing harder and harder on the 
national churches the worst claims of the Papal court, 
by demands of first-fruits and annates from rectory and 
bishopric, by pretensions to the right of bestowing all 
benefices which were in ecclesiastical patronage and by 
the sale of these presentations, by the direct taxation of 
the clergy, by the intrusion of foreign priests into Eng- 
lish livings, by opening a mart for the disposal of 
pardons, dispensations, and indulgences, and by encourag- 
ing appeals from every ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the 


338k HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 


Papal court. No grievance was more bitterly felt than 
this grievance of appeals. Cases of the most trifling 
importance were called for decision out of the realm to a 
tribunal whose delays were proverbial and whose fees 
were enormous. The envy of an Oxford College which 
sought only a formal licence to turn a vicarage into a 
rectory had not only to bear the expense and toil of a 
journey which then occupied some eighteen days but was 
kept dangling at Avignon for three-and-twenty weeks: 
Humiliating and vexatious however as these appeals 
were, they were but one among the means of extortion 
which the Papal court multiplied as its needs grew 
greater. The protest of a later Parliament, exaggerated 
as its statements no doubt are, shows the extent of the 
national irritation, if not of the grievances which pro- 
duced it. It asserted that the taxes levied by the Pope 
amounted to five times the amount of those levied by 
the king; that by reservations during the life of actual 
holders the Pope disposed of the same bishopric four 
or five times over, receiving each time the first-fruits. 
“The brokers of the sinful city of Rome promote for 
money unlearned and unworthy caitiffs to benefices to 
the value of a thousand marks, while the poor and learned 
hardly obtain one of twenty. So decays sound learning. 
They present aliens who neither see nor care to see their 
parishioners, despise God's services, convey away the 
treasure of the realm, and are worse than Jews or Sara- 
cens. The Pope’s revenue from England alone is larger 
than that of any prince in Christendom. God gave his 
sheep to be pastured, not to be shaven and shorn.” At 
the close of this reign indeed the deaneries of Lichfield, 
Salisbury, and York, the archdeaconry of Canterbury, 
which was reputed the wealthiest English benefice, 
together with a host of prebends and preferments, were 
held by Italian cardinals and priests, while the Pope’s 
collector from his office in London sent twenty thousand 
marks a year to the Papal treasury. 

But the greed of the Popes was no new grievance, 
though the increase of these exactions since the removal 
to Avignon gave it a new force. What alienated Eng- 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 385 


land most was their connexion with and dependence on 
France. From the first outset of the troubles in the 
North their attitude had been one of hostility to the Eng- 
lish projects. France was too useful a supporter of the 
Papal court to find much difficulty in inducing it to aid 
in hampering the growth of English greatness. Boniface 
the Eighth released Balliol from his oath of fealty, and 
forbad Edward to attack Scotland on the ground that it 
was a fief of the Roman see. His intervention was met. 
by a solemn and emphatic protest from the English Par- 
liament; but it none the less formed a terrible obstacle 
in Edward's way. ‘The obstacle was at last removed by 
the quarrel of Boniface with Philip the Fair; but the end 
of this quarrel only threw the Papacy more completely 
into the hands of France. Though Avignon remained 
imperial soil, the removal of the Popes to this city on the 
verge of their dominions made them mere tools of the 
French Kings. Much, no doubt, of the endless negotiation 
which the Papal court carried on with Edward the Third 
in his strife with Philip of Valois was an honest struggle 
for peace. But to England it seemed the mere interfer- 
ence of a dependent on behalf of “ our enemy of France.” 
The people scorned a “ French Pope,” and threatened 
Papal legates with stoning when they landed on English 
shores. The alliance of Edward with an excommuni- 
cated Emperor, the bold defiance with which English 
priests said mass in Flanders when an interdict reduced 
the Flemish priests to silence, were significant tokens of 
the new attitude which England was taking up in the 
face of Popes who were leagued withits enemy. Theold 
quarrel over ecclesiastical wrongs was renewed in a formal 
and decisive way. In 1343 the Commons petitioned for 
the redress of the grievance of Papal appointments to va- 
cant livings in despite of the rights of patrons or the 
Crown; and Edward formally complained to the Pope of 
his appointing “ foreigners, most of them suspicious per- 
sons, who do not reside on their benefices, who. do not 
know the faces of the flocks entrusted to them, who do 
not understand their language, but, neglecting the cure 
of souls, seek as hirelings only their worldly hire.’ In 
D4, 


386 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


yet sharper words the King rebuked the Papal greed. 
«The successor of the Apostles was set over the Lord’s 
sheep to feed and not to shear them.” The Parliament 
declared “ that they neither could nor would tolerate such 
things any longer;” and the general irritation moved 
slowly towards those statutes of Provisors and Praemunire 
which heralded the policy of Henry the Eighth. 

But for the moment the strife with the Papacy was 
set aside in the eftorts which were needed for a new 
struggle with France. The campaign of 1339 had not 
only ended in failure, it had dispelled the trust of Ed- 
ward in an Imperial alliance. But as this hope faded 
away a fresh hope dawned on the King from another 
quarter. Flanders, still bleeding from the defeat of its 
burghers by the French knighthood, was his natural ally. 
England was the great wool-producing country of the 
west, but few woollen fabrics were woven in England. 
The number of weavers’ gilds shows that the trade was 
gradually extending, and at the very outset of his reign 
Edward had taken steps for its encouragement. He in- 
vited Flemish weavers to settle in his country, and took 
the new immigrants, who chose the eastern counties for 
the seat of their trade, under his royal protection. But 
English manufactures were still in their infancy, and nine- 
tenths of the English wool went to the looms of Bruges 
or of Ghent. We may see the rapid growth of this ex- 
port trade in the fact that the King received in a single 
year more than £30,000 from duties levied on wool alone. 
The wool-sack which forms the Chancellor’s seat in the 
House of Lords is said to witness to the importance which 
the government attached to this new source of wealth. 
A stoppage of this export threw half the population of the 
great Flemish towns out of work, and the irritation 
caused in Flanders by the interruption which this trade 
sustained through the piracies that Philip’s ships were 
carrying on in the Channel showed how effective the 
threat of such a stoppage would be in securing their alli- 
ance. Nor was this the only ground for hoping for aid 
from the Flemish towns. Their democratic spirit jostled 
roughly with the feudalism of France. If their counts 


THE PARLIAMENT. 13807—1461. 387 


clung to the French monarchy, the towns themselves, 
proud of their immense population, their thriving in- 
dustry, their vast wealth, drew more and more to inde- 
pendence. Jacques van Arteveldt, a great brewer of 
Ghent, wielded the chief influence in their councils, and 
his aim was to build up a confederacy which might hold 
France in check along her northern border. 

His plans had as. yet brought no help from the Flemish 
towns, but at the close of 1539 they set aside their neu- 
trality for open aid. The great plan of Federation which 
Van Arteveldt had been devising as a check on the ag- 
gression of France was carried out in a treaty concluded 
between Edward, the Duke of Brabant, the cities of Brus- 
sels, Antwerp, Louvain, Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, and seven 
others. By this remarkable treaty 1t was provided that 
war should be begun and ended only by mutual consent, 
free commerce be encouraged between Flanders and Bra- 
bant, and no change made in their commercial arrange- 
ments save with the consent of the whole league. By a 
subsequent treaty the Flemish towns owned Edward as 
King of France, and declared war against Philip of Valois. 
But their voice was decisive on the course of the cam- 
paign which opened in 1340. As Philip held the Upper 
Scheldt by the occupation of Cambray, so he held the 
Lower Scheldt by that of Tournay, a fortress which broke 
the line of commerce between Flanders and Brabant. It 
was a condition of the Flemish alliance therefore that 
the war should open with the capture of Tournay. It 
was only at the cost of a fight however that Edward 
could now cross the Channel to undertake the siege. 
France was as superior in force at sea as on land; and a 
fleet of two hundred vessels gathered at Sluys to inter- 
cept him. But the fine seamanship of the English sailors 
justified the courage of their King in attacking this fleet 
with far smaller forces; the French ships were utterly 
destroyed and twenty thousand Frenchmen slain in the 
encounter. It was with the lustre of this great victory 
about him that Edward marched upon Tournay. Its 
siege however proved as fruitless as that of Cambray in 
the preceding year, and after two mouths of investment 


© 


388 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


his vast army of one hundred thousand men broke up 
without either capturing the town or bringing Philip 
when he approached it to an engagement. Want of 
money forced Edward to a truce for a year, and he re- 
turned beggared and embittered to England. 

He had been worsted in war as in diplomacy. One 
naval victory alone redeemed years of failure and expense. 
Guienne was all but lost, England was suffering from the 
terrible taxation, from the ruin of commerce, from the 
ravages of her coast. Five years of constant reverses 
were hard blows for a King of twenty-eight who had h2en 
glorious and successful at twenty-three. His finangial 
difficulties indeed were enormous. It was in vai that, 
availing himself of an Act which forbad the exportation 
of wool * till by the King and his Council it is otherwise 
provided,” he turned for the time the wool-trade into a 
royal monopoly and became the sole wool exporter, buy- 
ing at £5 and selling at £20 the sack. The campaign of 
1539 brought with it a crushing debt: that of 1340 proved 
yet more costly. Edward attributed his failure to the 
slackness of his ministers in sending money and supplies, 
and this to their silent opposition to the war. But wroth 
as he was on his return, a short struggle between the 
ministers and the King ended in a reconciliation, and 
preparations for renewed hostilities went on. Abroad 
indeed nothing could be done. The Emperor finally 
withdrew from Edward's friendship. A new Pope, Clem- 
ent the Sixth, proved even more French in sentiment 
than his predecessor. Flanders alone held true of all 
England’s foreign allies. Edward was powerless to at- 
tack Philip in the realm he claimed for his own; what 
strength he could gather was needed to prevent the utter 
ruin of the English cause in Scotland on the return of 
David Bruce. Edward’s soldiers had been driven from 
the open country and confined to the fortresses of the 
Lowlands. Eyen these were at last reft away. Perth 
was taken by siege, and the King was too late to prevent 
the surrender of Stirling. Edinburgh was captured by a 
stratagem. Only Roxburgh and Berwick were saved by 
: truce which Edward was driven to conclude with the 

cots. 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 389 


But with the difficulties of the Crown the weight of 
the two Houses made itself more and more sensibly felt. 
The almost incessant warfare which had gone on since 
the accession of Edward the Third consolidated and de- 
veloped the power which they had gained from the dis- 
sensions of his father’s reign. The need of continual 
grants brought about an assembly of Parliament year by 
year, and the subsidies that were accorded to the King 
showed the potency of the financial engine which the 
Crown could now bring into play. In a single year the © 
Parliament granted twenty thousand sacks, or half the 
wool of the realm. ‘Two years later the Commons voted 
an aid of thirty thousand sacks. In 1339 the barons 
eranted the tenth sheep and fleece and lamb. The clergy 
granted two tenths in one year, and a tenth for three 
years in the next. But with each supply some step was 
made to greater political influence. In his earlier years 
Edward showed no jealousy of the Parliament. His 
policy was to make the struggle with France a national 
one by winning for it the sympathy of the people at 
large; and with this view he not only published in the 
County Courts the efforts he had made for peace, but 
appealed again and again for the sanction and advice of 
Parliament in his enterprise. In 1331 he asked the 
Estates whether they would prefer negotiation or war: 
in 1338 he declared that his expedition to Flanders was 
made by the assent of the Lords and at the prayer of the 
Commons. The part of the last in public affairs grew 
greater in spite of their own efforts to remain obscure. 
From the opening of the reign a crowd of enactments for 
the regulation of trade, whether wise or unwise, shows 
the influence of the burgesses. But the final division of 
Parliament into two Houses, a change which was com- 
pleted by 1341, necessarily increased the weight of the 
Commons. The humble trader who shrank from coun. 
selling the Crown in great matters of policy gathered 
courage as he found himself sitting side by side with the 
knights of the shire. It was at the moment when this 
great change was being brought about that the disasters 
of the war spurred the Parliament to greater activity. 


390 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


The enormous grants of 1°40 were bought by the King’s 
assent to statutes which provided remedies for grievances 
of which the Commons complained. The most important 
of these put an end to the attempts which Edward had 
made like his grandfather to deal with the merchant class 
apart from the Houses. No charges or aid was hence- 
forth to be made save by the common assent of the 
Estates assembled in Parliament. The progress of the 
next year was yet more important. The strife of the 
King with his ministers, the foremost of whom was Arch- 
bishop Stratford, ended in the Primate’s refusal to make 
answer to the royal charges save in full Parliament, and 
in the assent of the King to a resolution of the Lords 
that none of their number, whether ministers of the 
Crown or no, should be brought to trial elsewhere than 
before his peers. The commons demanded and obtained 
the appointment of commissioners elected in Parliament 
to audit the grants already made. Finally it was enacted 
that at each Parliament the ministers should hold them- 
selves accountable for all grievances; that on any 
vacancy the King should take counsel with his lords as 
to the choice of the new minister; and that, when 
chosen, each minister should be sworn in Parliament. 

At the moment which we have reached therefore the 
position of the Parliament had become far more impor- 
tant than at Edward’s accession. Its form was settled. 
‘The third estate had gained a fuller parliamentary power. 
The principle of ministerial responsibility to the Houses 
had been established by formal statute. But the jealousy 
of Edward was at last completely roused, and from this 
moment he looked on the new power as a rival to his 
own. The Parliament of 1341 had no sooner broken up 
than he revoked by Letters Patent the statutes it had 
passed as done in prejudice of his prerogative, and only 
assented to for the time to prevent worse confusion, 
The regular assembly of the Estates was suddenly inter- 
rupted, and two years passed without a Parliament. It 
was only the continual presence of war whick from this 
time drove Edward to summon the Houses at all. 
Though the truce still held good between England and 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 391 


France, a quarrel of succession to the Duchy of Britanny 
which broke out in 1541 and called Philip to the support 
of one claimant, his cousin Charles of Blois, and Edward 
to the support of a rival claimant, John of Montfort, 
dragged on year after year. In Flanders things went ill 
for the English cause. ‘The dissensions between the 
great and the smaller towns, and in the greater towns 
themselves between the weavers and fullers, dissensions 
which had taxed the genius of Van Arteveldt through 
the nine years of his wonderful rule, broke out in 1345— 
into a revolt at Ghent, in which the great statesman was 
slain. With him fell a design for the deposition of the 
Count of Flanders and the reception of the Prince of 
Wales in his stead which he was ardently pressing, and 
whose political results might have been immense. Depu- 
ties were at once sent to England to excuse Van Arte- 
veldt’s murder and to promise loyalty to Edward; but 
the King’s difficulties had now reached their height. 
His loans from the Florentine bankers amounted to half 
aimillion. His claim on the French crown found not a 
single adherent save among the burghers of the Flemish 
towns. The overtures which he made for peace were 
contemptuously rejected, and the expiration of the truce 
in 1345 found him again face to face with France. 

But it was perhaps this breakdown of all foreign hope 
that contributed to Edward’s success in the fresh out- 
break of war. The war opened in Guienne, and Henry 
of Lancaster, who was now known as the Earl of Derby, 
and who with the Hainaulter Sir Walter Maunay took the 
command in that quarter, at once showed the abilities of 
a great general. The course of tiie Garonne was cleared 
by his capture of La Reole and Aiguillon, that of the 
Dordogne by the reduction of Bergerac, and a way opened 
for the reconquest of Poitou by the capture of Angou- 
léme. These unexpected successes roused Philip to 
strenuous efforts, and a hundred thousand men gathered 
_ under his son, John, Duke of Normandy, for the subjuga- 
tion of the South. Angoul@éme was won back, and 
Aiguillon besieged when Edward sailed to the aid of his 
hard-pressed lieutenant. It was with an army of thirty 


392 HISTORY OF THE ENGIISH PEOPLE. 


thousana men, half English, half Irish and Welsh, that 
he commenced a march which was to change the whole 
face of the war. His aim was simple. Flanders was 
still true to Edward’s cause, and while Derby was press- 
ing on in the south a Flemish army besieged Bouvines 
and threatened France from the north. ‘The King had 
at first proposed to land in Guienne and relieve the 
forces in the south; but suddenly changing his design 
he disembarked at La Hogue and advanced through Nov-_ 
mandy. By this skilful movement Edward not only 1¢- 
lieved Derby but threatened Paris, and left himself able 
to co-operate with either his own army in the south or 
the Flemings in the north. Normandy was totally with- 
out defence, and after the sack of Caen, which was then 
one of the wealthiest towns in France, Edward marched 
upon the Seine. His march threatened Rouen and Paris, 
and its strategical value was seen by the sudden panic of 
the French King. Philip was wholly taken by surprise. 
He attempted to arrest Edward’s march by an offer to 
restore the Duchy of Aquitaine as Edward the Second 
had held it, but the offer was fruitless. Philip was 
forced to call his son to the rescue. John at once 
raised the siege of Aiguillon, and the French army 
moved rapidly to the north, its withdrawal enabling 
Derby to capture Poitiers and make himself thorough 
master of the south. But John was too distant from 
Paris for his forces to avail Philip in his emergency, for 
Edward, finding the bridges on the Lower Seine broken, 
pushed straight on Paris, rebuilt the bridge of Poissy, 
and threatened the capital. 

At this crisis, however, France found an unexpected 
help in a body of German knights. The long strife be- 
tween Lewis of Bavaria and the Papacy had ended at 
last in Clement’s carrying out his sentence of deposition 
by the nomination and coronation as emperor of Charles 
of Luxemburg, a son of King John of Bohemia, the well 
known Charles IV. of the Golden Bull. But against . 
this Papal assumption of a right to bestow the German 
Crown Germany rose as one man. Not a town opened 
its gates to the Papal claimant, and driven to seek help 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 393 


and refuge from Philip of Valois he found himself at this 
moment on the eastern frontier of France with his 
father and 500 knights. Hurrying to Paris this German 
force formed the nucleus of an army which assembled at 
St. Denys; and which was soon reinforced by 15,000 
Genoese cross-bowmen who had been hired from arfong 
the soldiers of the Lord of Monaco on the sunny Riviera 
and arrived at this hour of need. With this host rapidly 
gathering in his front Edward abandoned his march on 
Paris, which had already served its purpose in relieving | 
Derby, and threw himself across the Seine to carry out 
the second part of his programme by a junction with the 
Flemings at Gravelines and a campaign in the north. 
But the rivers in his path were carefully guarded, and it 
was only by surprising the ford of Blanche-Taque on 
the Somme that the King escaped the necessity of sur- 
rendering to the vast host which was now hastening in 
pursuit. His communications, however, were no sooner 
secured than he halted on the twenty-sixth of August, at 
the little village of Crecy, in Ponthieu, and resolved to 
give battle. Half of his army, which had been greatly 
reduced in strength by his rapid marches, consisted of 
light-armed footmen from Ireland and Wales, the bulk 
of the remainder was composed of English bowmen. 
The King ordered his men-at-arms to dismount, and drew 
up his forces on a low rise sloping gently to the south- 
east, with a deep ditch covering its front, and its flanks 
protected by woods anda little brook. From a wind- 
mill on the summit of this rise Edward could overlook 
the whole field of battle. Immediately beneath him lay 
his reserve, while at the base of the slope was placed the 
main body of the army in two divisions, that to the right 
commanded by the young Prince of Wales, Edward “the 
Black Prince,” as he was called, that to the left by the 
Earl of Northampton. A small ditch protected the Eng- 
lish front, and behind it the bowmen were drawn up ‘“‘in 
the form of a harrow” with small bombards between 
them ‘ which with fire threw little iron balls to frighten 
the horses,” the first instance known of the use of artil- 
lery in field: warfare. 


394 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


The halt of the English army took Philip by surprise, 
and he attempted for a time to check the advance of his 
army. But the attempt was fruitless and the disorderly 
host rolled on the English front. ‘The sight of his ene- 
mies indeed stirred Philip’s own blood to fury, “for he 
hated them.” The fight began at vespers. The Genoese 
cross-bowmen were ordered to open the attack, but the 
men were weary with their march, a sudden storm wetted 
and rendered useless their bowstrings, and the loud 
shouts with which they leapt forward to the encounter 
were met with dogged silence in the English ranks. 
Their first arrow flight, however, brought a terrible 
reply. So rapid was the English shot “that it seemed 

as if it snowed.” ‘ Kill me these scoundrels,” shouted 
Philip, as the Genoese fell back; and his men-at-arms 
plunged butchering into their broken ranks while the 
Counts of Alencgon and Flanders at the head of the 
French knighthood fell hotly on the Prince’s line. For 
an instant his small force seemed lost, and he called his 
father to support him. But Edward refused to send him 
aid. ‘Is he dead, or unhorsed, or so wounded that he 
cannot help himself?” he asked the envoy. “No, sir,” 
was the reply, “ but he is in a hard passage of arms, and. 
sorely needs your help.” ‘Return to those that sent 
you,” said the King, “ and bid them not send to me again 
so long as my son lives! Let the boy win his spurs, for, 
if God so order it, I will that the day may be his and 
that the honor may be with him and them to whom I 
have given it in charge.”. Edward could see in fact from 
his higher ground that all went well. The English bow- 
men and men-at-arms held their ground stoutly while the 
Welshmen stabbed the French horses in the melly and 
brought knight after knight to the ground. Soon the 
French host was wavering in a fatal confusion. “You 
are my vassals, my friends,” cried the blind John of 
Bohemia to the German nobles around him, “I pray and 
beseech you to lead me so far into the fight that I may 
strike one good blow with this sword of mine!”  Link- 
ing their bridles together, the little company plunged 
into the thick of the combat to fall as their fellows were 


a PARLIAMENT. 13807—1461. 395 


falling, The battle went steadily against the French. 
At last Philip himself hurried from the field, and the de- 
feat became a rout. ‘Twelve hundreds knights and 
thirty thousand footmen—a number equal to the whole 
English foree—lay dead upon the ground. 

‘“God has punished us for our sins,” cries the chroni- 
cler of St. Denys in a passion of bewildered grief as he 
tells the rout of the great host which he had seen muster- 
ing beneath his abbey walls. But the fall of France was. 
hardly so sudden or so incomprehensible as the ruin at 
a single blow of a system of warfare, and with it of the 
political and social fabric which had risen out of that 
system. Feudalism rested on the superiority of the horse- 
man to the footman, of the mounted noble to the un- 
mounted churl. The real fighting powey of a feudal 
army lay in its knighthood, in the baronage and Jand- 
owners who took the field, each with his group of es- 
quires and mounted men-at-arms. <A host of footmen 
followed them, but they were ill-armed, ill-disciplined, 
and seldom called on to play any decisive part on the 
actual battle-field. In France, and especially at the mo- 
ment we have reached, the contrast between the effici- 
eucy of these two elements of warfare was more striking 
than elsewhere. Nowhere was the chivalry so splendid. 
nowhere was the general misery and oppression of the 
poor more terribly expressed in the worthlessness ot the 
mob of footmen who were driven by their lords to the 
eamp. In Engiand, on the other hand, the failure of 
feudalism to win a complete hold on the country was 
seen in the persistence of the older national institutions 
which based its defence on the general levy of its free- 
men. If the foreign Kings added to this a system of 
warlike organization grounded on the service due fiom 
its military tenants to the Crown, they were far from re- 
garding this as superseding the national “fyrd.” The 
Assize of Arms, the Statute of Winchester, show with 
what care the fyrd was held in a state of efficiency. Its 
force indeed as an engine of war was fast rising between 
the age of Henry the Second and that of Edward the 
Third. The social changes on which we have already 


396 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


dwelt, the facilities given to alienation and the subdivi 
sion of lands, the transition of the serf into a copyholder 
and of the copyholder by redemption of his services into 
a freeholder, the rise of a new class of “farmers” as the 
lords ceased to till their demesne by means of bailiffs and 
adopted the practice of leasing it at a rent or “farm” to 
one of the customary tenants, the general increase of 
wealth which was telling on the social position even of 
those who still remained in villenage, undid more and 
more the earlier process which had degraded the free 
ceorl of the English Conquest into the villein of the 
Norman Conquest, and covered the land with a popula- 
tion of yeomen, some freeholders, some with services that 
every day became less weighty and already left them 
virtually free.. 

Such men,proud of their right to justice and an equal 
law, called by attendance in the county court to a share in 
the judicial, the financial, and the political life of the 
realm, were of a temper to make soldiers of a different 
sort from the wretched serfs who followed the feudal lords 
of the Continent, and they were equipped with a weapon 
which as they wielded it was enough of itself to make 
a revolution in the art of war. The bow, identified as it 
became with English warfare, was the weapon not of 
Englishmen but of their Norman conquerors. It was the 
Norman arrow-flight that decided the day of Senlac. 
But in the organization of the national army it had been 
assigned as the weapon of the poorer freeholders who were 
liable to serve at the King’s summons; and we see how 
closely it had become associated with them in the picture 
of Chaucer’s yeoman. ‘In his hand he bore a mighty 
bow.” Its might lay not only in the range of the heavy 
war-shaft, a range we are told of four hundred yards, but 
in its force. The English archer, taught from very child- 
hood “ how to draw, how to lay his body to the bow,” his 
skill quickened by incessant practise and constant rivalry 
with his fellows, raised the bow into a terrible engine of 
war. Thrown out along the front in a loose order that 
alone showed their vigor and self-dependence, the bow- 
men faced and riddled the splendid line of knighthood - 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307T—1461. 397 


as it charged upon them. The galled horses “reeled right 
rudely.” Their riders found even the steel of Milan a 
poor defenceagainst the grey-goose shaft. Gradually the 
bow dictated the very tactics of an English battle. Ifthe 
mass of cavalry still plunged forward, the screen ofarchers 
broke to right and left and the men-at-arms who lay in 
reserve behind them made short work of the broken and 
disordered horsemen, while the hight troops from Wales 
and Ireland, flinging themselves into the melly with their 
long knives and darts, brought steed after steed to the 
ground. It wasthis new military engine that Edward the 
Third carried to the fields of France. His armies were 
practically bodies of hired soldiery, for the short period of 
feudal service was insufficient for foreign campaigns, and 
yeoman and baron were alike drawn by a high rate of pay. 
An archer’s daily wages equalled some five shillings of our 
present money. Such payment, when coupled with the 
hope of plunder, was enough to draw yeomen from thorpe 
and farm , and though the royal treasury was drained as 
it had never been drained before, the English King saw 
himself after the day of Crecy the master of a force with- 
out rival in the stress of war. 

To England her success was the beginning of a career 
of military glory which, fatal as it was destined to prove 
to the higher sentiments and interests of the nation, gave 
ita warlike energy such as it had never known before. 
Victory followed victory. A few months after Crecy a 
Scotch army marched over the border and faced, on the 
seventeenth of October, an English force at Neville’s Cross. 
But it was soon broken by the arrow-flight of the English 
archers, and the Scotch King, David Bruce, was taken 
prisoner. The withdrawal ofthe French from the Garonne 
enabled Henry of Derby to recover Poitou. Edward 
meanwhile, with a decision which marks his military ca- 
pacity, marched from the field of Crecy to form the siege 
of Calais. No measure could have been more popular 
with the English merchant class, for Calais was a great 
pirate-haven,and inasingle year twenty-two privateers from 
its port had swept the Channel. But Edward was guided 
by weightier considerations than this. In spite of his 


398 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 


victory at Sluys the superiority of France at sea had been 
a constant embarrassment. From this difficulty the cap- 
ture of Calais would do much to deliver him, for Dover 
and Calais together bridled the Channel. Nor was this 
all. Not only would the possession of the town give 
Edward a base ot operations against France, but it afforded 
an easy means of communication with the only sure 
allies of England, the towns of Flanders. Flanders 
seemed at this moment to be wavering. Its Count had 
fallen at Crecy, but his son Lewis le Male, though his 
sympathies were as French as his father’s, was received in 
November by his subjects with the invariable loyalty 
which they showed to their rulers; and his own effortsto - 
detach them from England were seconded by the influence 
of the Duke of Brabant. But with Edward close at hand 
beneath the walls of Calais, the Flemish towns stood true. 
They prayed the young Count to marry Edward’s daugh- 
ter, imprisoned him on his refusal, and on his eseape to the 
French Courtin the spring of 1347, they threw themselves 
heartily. into the English cause. A hundred thousand 
Flemings advanced to Cassel and ravaged the French 
frontier. 

The danger of Calais roused Philip from the panic 
which had followed his defeat, and with a vast army he 
advanced to the north. But Edward’s lines were imprceg- 
nable. The French King failed in another attempt to 
dislodge the Flemings, and was at last driven to retreat 
without a blow. Hopeless of further succor, the town, 
after a year’s siege, was starved into surrender in August, 
1347. Mercy was granted to the garrison and the people 
on condition that six of the citizens gave themselves into 
the English King’s hands. ‘On them,” said Edward with 
a burst of bitter hatred, “I will do my will.” At the 
sound of the town bell, Jehan le Bel tells us, the folk of 
Calais gathered round the bearer of these terms, “ desiring 
to hear their good news, for they were all mad with hun- 
ger. When the said knight told them his news, then be- 
gan they to weep and cry so loudly that it was great pity. 
Then stood up the wealthiest burgess of the town, Master 
Eustache de St. Pierre by name, and spake thus before 


THE PARLIAMENT. 13807—1461 399 


all: ‘My masters, great grief and mishap it were for all 
to leave such a people as this is to die by famine or other- 
wise ; and great charity and grace would he win from 
our Lord who could defend them from dying. For me, I 
have great hope in the Lord that if I can save this people 
by my death I shall have pardon for my faults, wherefore 
will I be the first of the six, and of my own will put my- 
self, barefoot in my shirt and with a halter round my neck, 
in the mercy of King Edward.” The list of devoted 
men was soon made up, and the victims were led before 
the king. “ All the host assembled together; there was 
great press, and many bade hang them openly, and many 
wept for pity. The noble King came with his train of 
counts and barons to the place, and the Queen followed 
him, though great with child, to see what there would be. 
- The six citizens knelt down at once before the King, and 
Master Eustache spake thus :—* Gentle King, here we be 
six who have been of the old bourgeoisie of Calais and 
great merchants; we bring you the keys of the town and 
castle of Calais, and render them to you at your pleasure. 
We set ourselves in such wise as you see purely at your 
will, to save the remnant of the people that has suffered 
much pain. So may you have pity and mercy on us for 
your high nobleness’ sake.’ Certes, there was then in 
that place neither lord nor knight that wept not for pity, 
nor who could speak for pity; but the King had his 
heart so hardened by wrath that fora long while he could 
not reply; then he commanded to cut off their heads. 
Allthe knights and lords prayed him with tears, as much 
as they could, to have pity on them, but he would not 
hear. Then spoke the gentle knight, Master Walter de 
Maunay, and said, ‘ Ha, gentle sire! bridle your wrath; 
you have the renown and good fame of all gentleness ; 
do not a thing whereby men can speak any villany of 
you! If you haveno pity, all men will say that you have 
a heart full of all cruelty to put these good citizens to 
death that of their own will are come to render them- 
selves to you to save the remnant of the people. At this 
point the King changed countenance with wrath, and 
said ‘Hold your peace, Master Walter! it shall be none 


400 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


otherwise. Call the headsman. They of Calais have 
made so many of my men die, that they must die them- 
selves!’ Then did the noble Queen of England a deed 
of noble lowliness, seeing she was great with child, and 
wept so tenderly for pity that she could no longer stand 
upright; therefore she cast herself on her knees before 
her lord the King and spake on this wise: ‘ Ah, gentle 
sire, from the day that I passed over sea in great peril, 
as you know, I have asked for nothing: now pray I and 
beseech you, with folded hands, for the love of our Lady’s 
Son to have mercy upon them.’ The gentle King waited 
a while before speaking, and looked on the Queen as she 
knelt before him bitterly weeping. Then began his heart 
to soften a little, and he said, ‘ Lady, I would rather you 
had been otherwise; you pray so tenderly that I dare not 
refuse you; and though I do it against my will, never- 
theless take them, I give them to you.’ Then took he 
the six citizens by the halters and delivered them to the 
Queen, and released from death all those-of Calais for the 
love of her; and the good lady bade them clothe the six 
burgesses and make them good cheer.” 


CHAPTER III. 
THE PEASANT REVOLT, 
1347—1881. 


STILL in the vigor of manhood, for he was but thirty- 
five, Edward the Third stood at the height of his renown. 
He had won the greatest victory of his age. France, till 
now the first of European states, was broken and dashed 
from her pride of place at a single blow. The kingdom 
seemed to lie at Edward’s mercy, for Guienne was re- 
covered, Flanders was wholly on his side, and Britanny, 
where the capture of Charles of Blois secured the success 
_ of his rival and the English party which supported him, 
opened the road to Paris. At home his government was 
popular, and Scotland, the one enemy he had to dread, 
was bridled by the capture of her King. How great his 
renown was in Europe was seen in 1347, when on the 
death of Lewis of Bavaria the electors offered him the 
Imperial Crown. Edward was in truth a general of a 
high order, and-he had shown himself as consummate a 
strategist in the campaign as a tactician in the field. But 
to the world about him he was even more illustrious as 
the foremost representative of the showy chivalry of his 
day. He loved the pomp of tournaments; he revived the 
Round Table of the fabled Arthur; he celebrated his 
victories by the creation of a new order of knighthood. 
He had varied the sterner operations of the siege of Calais 
by a hand to hand combat with one of the bravest of the 
F'rench knights. A naval picture of Froissart sketches 
Kidward for us as he sailed to meet a Spanish fleet which 
was sweeping the narrow seas. We see the King sitting 

26 (401) 


402. HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


on deck in his jacket of black velvet, his head covered by 
a black beaver hat ‘which became him well,” and calling 
on Sir John Chandos to troll out the songs he had brought 
with him from Germany, till the Spanish ships heave in 
sight and a furious fight begins which ends in a victory 
that leaves Edward “ King of the Seas.” 3 

But beneath all this glitter of chivalry lay the subtle, 
busy diplomatist. None of our Kings was so restless a 
negotiator. From the first hour of Edward’s rule the 
threads of his diplomacy ran over Europe in almost in- 
extricable confusion. And to all who dealt with him he 
was equally false and tricky. Emperor was plaved off 
against Pope and Pope against Emperor, the friendship of 
the Flemish towns was adroitly used to put a pressure on 
their counts, the national wrath against the exactions of 
the Roman see was employed to bridle the French sympa- 
thies ofthe court of Avignon, and when the statutes which 
it produced had served their purpose they were set aside 
for a bargain in which King and Pope shared the plunder 
of the Church between them. His temper was as false in 
his dealings with his people as in his dealings with the 
European powers. Edward aired to country and parlia- 
ment his English patriotism. ‘“ Above all other lands and 
realms,” he made his chancellor say,“ the King had most 
tenderly at heart his land of England, a land more full of 
delight and honor and profit to him than any other.” 
His manners were popular; he donned on occasion the 
livery of a city gild; he dined with a London merchant. 
His perpetual parliaments, his appeals to them and to the 
country at large for counsel and aid, seemed to promise a 
ruler who was absolutely one at heart with the people he 
ruled. But when once Edward passed from sheer careless- 
ness and gratification at the new source of wealth which 
the Parliament opened to a sense of what its power really 
was becoming, he showed himself as jealous of freedom 
as any king that had gone before him. He sold his 
assent to its demands for heavy subsidies, and when he 
had pocketed the money coolly declared the statutes he 
had sanctioned null and void. The constitutional pro- 
gress which was made during his reign was due to his 


THE PARLIAMENT. 13807—1461. 403 


absorption in showy schemes of foreign ambition, to his 
preference for way and diplomatic intrigue over the sober 
business of civil administration. ‘The same shallowness 
of temper, the same showiness and falsehood, ran through 
his personal character. ‘The King, who was a model of 
chivalry in. his dealings with knight and noble, showed 
himself a brutal savage to the burgesses of Calais. Even 
the courtesy to his Queen, which throws its halo over the 
story of their deliverance went hand in hand with a con- 
stant disloyalty to her. When once Philippa was dead, 
his profligacy threw all shame aside. He paraded a mis- 
tress as Queen of Beauty through the streets of London, 
and set her in pomp over tournaments as the Lady of the 
Sun. The nobles were quick to follow their lord’s ex- 
ample. ‘In those days,” writes a chronicler of the time, 
“arose a rumor and clamor among the people that 
wherever there was a tournament there came a great con- 
course of ladies, of the most costly and beautiful but not 
of the best in the kingdom, sometimes forty and fifty in 
number, as if they were a part of the tournament, ladies 
clad in diverse and wonderful male apparel, in parti- 
coloured tunics, with short caps and bands wound cord- 
wise round their heads, and girdles bound with gold and 
silver, and daggers in pouches across their body. And 
thus they rode on choice coursers to the place of tourney ; 
and so spent and wasted their goods and vexed their bodies 
with scurrilous wantonness that the murmurs of the peo- 
ple sounded everywhere. Bnt they neither feared God 
nor blushed at the chaste voice of the people,” 

_ the “chaste voice of the people” was soon to grow 
into the stern moral protest of the Lollards, but for the 
moment all murmurs were hushed by the King’s succeys,. 
The truce which followed the capture of Calais seemed a- 
mere rest in the career of victories which opened before: 
Edward. England was drunk with her glory and with 
the hope of plunder. The cloths of Caen had been - 
brought after the sack of that town to London. “There 
was no woman.” says Walsingham, “who had not got 
garments, furs, feather-beds, and utensils from the spoils of 
Calais and other foreign cities.’ The Court revelled in 


404 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


corgeous tournaments and luxury of dress ; and the estab- 
lishment, in 1346, of the Order of the Garter which found 
its home in the new castle that Edward was raising at 
Windsor,-marked the highest reach of the spurious 
“Chivalry” of the day. But it was at this moment of 
triumph that the whole color of Edward’s reign suddenly 
changed. The most terrible plague the world has ever 
witnessed advanced from the East, and after devastating 
Europe from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Baltic 
swooped, at the close of 1848, upon Britain. The traditions 
of its destructiveness and the panic-struck words of the 
statutes passed after its visitation have been amply justi-. 
fied by modern research. Ofthe three or four millious w ho 
then formed the population of England, more than one half 
were swept away in its repeated visitations. Its ravages 
were fiercest in the greater towns, where filthy and undrain- 
ed streets afforded a constant haunt to leprosy and fever. 
In the burial-ground which the piety of Sir Walter Maunay 
purchased for the citizens of London, a spot whose site 
was afterwards marked by the Charter House, more than 
fifty thousand corpses are said to have been interred. 
Thousands of people perished at Norwich, while in Bristol 
the living were hardly able to bury the dead. But the 
Black Death fell on the villages almost as fiercely as on 
the towns. More than one half of the priests of Yorkshire 
are known to have perished; in the diocese of Norwich 
two thirds of the parishes changed their incumbents. The 
whole organization of labor was thrown out of gear. 
The scarcity of hands produced by the terrible mortality 
made it difficult for villeins to perform the services due for 
their lands, and only a temporary abandonment of half 
the rent by the landowners induced the farmers of their 
demesnes to refrain from the abandonment of their farms. 
For a time cultivation became impossible. ‘ The sheep 
and cattle strayed through the fields and corn,” says a 
contemporary, “ and there were none left who could drive 
them.” Even when the first burst of panic was over, the 
sudden rise of wages consequent on the enormous diminu- 
tion in the supply of labor, though accompanied by a 
corresponding rise in the price of food, rudely disturbed 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 405 


the course of industrial employments. Harvests rotted on 
the ground and fields were left untilled not merely from 
searcity of hands but from the strife which now for the 
first time revealed itself between capital and labor. 
Nowhere was the effect of the Black Death so keenly 
felt as in its bearing on the social revolution which had 
been steadily going on for a century past throughout the 
country. At the moment we have reached the lord of a 
manor had been reduced over a large part of England to 
the position of a modern landlord, receiving a rental in 
money from his tenants and supplying their place in the 
cultivation of his demesne lands by paid laborers. He 
was driven by the progress of enfranchisement to rely 
for the purposes of cultivation on the supply of hired 
labor, and hitherto this supply had been abundant and 
cheap. But with the ravagesof the Black Death and the 
decrease of population labor at once became scarce and 
dear. ‘There wasa general rise of wages, and the farmers 
of the country as well as the wealthier craftsmen of the 
town saw themselves threatened with ruin by what seemed 
to their age the extravagant demands of the lubor class. 
Meanwhile the country was torn with riot and disorder. 
An outbreak of lawless self-indulgence which followed 
everywhere in the wake of the plague told especially upon+ 
the “landless men,” workers wandering in search of 
work who found themselves for the first time masters of 
the labor market , and the wandering laborer or artisan 
turned easily into the “sturdy beggar,” or the bandit of 
the woods. A summary redress for these evils was at 
once provided by the Crown in a royal proclamation. 
“ Because a great part of the people,” runs this ordinance, 
‘cand principally of laborers and servants, is dead of the 
plague, some, seeing the need of their lords and the scar- 
city of servants, are unwilling to serve unless they receive 
excessive wages, and others are rather begging in idleness 
than supporting themselves by labor, we have ordained 
that any able-bodied man or woman, of whatsoever con- 
dition, free or serf, under sixty years of age, not living of 
merchandise nor following a trade nor having of his own 
wherewithal to live, either his own land with the culture 


406 (STORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


of which he could occupy himself, and not serving another, 
shall if so required serve another for such wages as was 
the custom in the twentieth year of our reign or five or 
six years before.” : 

It was the failure of this ordinance to effect its ends 
which brought about, at the close of 1349, the passing of 
of the Statute of Laborers. ‘Every man or woman,” 
runs this famous provision, “ of whatsoever condition, free 
or bond, able in body, and within the age of threescore 
years, . . . and not having of his own whereof he may 
live, nor land of his own about the tillage of which he 
may occupy himself, and not serving any other, shall be 
bound to serve the employer who shall require him to do 
so, and shall take only the wages which were accustomed 
to be taken in the neighborhood where he is bound to 
serve” two years before the plague began. A refusal to 
obey was punished by imprisonment. Butsterner meas- 
ures were soon found to benecessary. Not only was the 
price of labor fixed by the Parliament of 1350, but the 
labor class was once more tied to the soil. The laborer 
was forbidden to quit the parish where he lived in search 
of better paid employment; if he disobeyed, he became a 
“fugitive,” and subject to imprisonment at the hands of 
justices of the peace. To enforce such a law literally. 
must have been impossible, for corn rose to so high a 
price that a day’s labor at the old wages would not 
have purchased wheat enough for a man’s support. But 
the landowners did not flinch from the attempt. The 
repeated re-enactment of the law shows the difficulty of 
applying it and the stubbornness of the struggle which 
it brought about. The fines and forfeitures which were 
levied for infractions of its provisions formed a large’ 
source of royal revenue, but so ineffectual were the origi- 
nal penalties that the runaway Jaborer was at last ordered 
to be branded with a hot iron on the forehead, while the 
harboring of serfs in towns was rigorously put down. 
Nor was it merely the existing class of free laborers 
which was attacked by this reactionary movement. The 
increase of their numbers by a commutation of labor 
services for money payments was suddenly checked, and 


THE PARLIAMENT. 13807—1461. 407 


the ingenuity of the lawyers who were employed as stew- 
ards of each manor was exercised in striving to restore 
to the landowners that customary labor whose loss was 
now severely felt. Manumissions and exemptions which 
had passed without question were cancelled on grounds 
of informality, and labor services from which they held 
themselves freed by redemption were again demanded 
from the villeins. The attempt was the more galling that 
the cause had to be pleaded in the manor-court itself, and 
to be decided by the very officer whose interest it was to 
give judgment in favor of his lord. We can see the 
growth of afierce spirit of resistance through the statutes 
which strove in vain to repress it. In the towns, where 
the system of forced labor was applied with even more 
rigor than in the country, strikes and combinations be- 
came frequent among the lower craftsmen. In the coun- 
try the free laborers found allies in the villeins whose 
freedom from manorial service was questioned. These 
were often men of position and substance, and throughout 
the eastern counties the gatherings of “ fugitive serfs ” 
were supported by an organized resistance and by large 
contributions of money on the part of the wealthier 
tenantry. 

With plague, famine, and social strife in the land, it 
was no time for reaping the fruits even of such a victory 
as Crecy. Luckily for England the pestilence had fallen 
as heavily on her foe as on herself. A common suffering 
and exhaustion forced both countries to a truce, and 
though desultory fighting went on along the Breton and 
Aquitanian borders, the peace which was thus secured 
lasted with brief intervals of fighting for seven years. It 
was not till 1355 that the failure of a last effort to turn 
the truce into a final peace again drove Edward into war. 
The campaign opened with a brilliant prospect of success. 
Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, held as a prince of 
descent from the house of Valois large fiefsin Normandy , 
and a quarrel springing suddenly up between him and 
John, who had now succeeded his father Philip on the 
throne of France, Charles offered to put his fortresses into 
Kdward’s hands. Masterof Cherbourg, Avranches, Pont- 


408 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


audemer, Evreux and Meulan, Mantes, Mortain, Pontoise, 
Charles held in his hands the keys of France; and 
Edward grasped at the opportunity of delivering a crush- 
ing blow. Three armies were prepared to act in Nor- 
mandy, Britanny, and Guienne. But the first two, with 
Edward and Henry of Derby, who had been raised to the 
dukedom of Lancaster, at their head, were detained by 
contrary winds, and Charles, despairing of their arrival, 
made peace with John. Edwardmade his way to Calais 
to meet the tidings of this desertion and to be called back 
to England by news of a recapture of Berwick by the 
Scots. But his hopes of Norman co-operation were re- 
vived in 1856. The treachery of John, his seizure of the 
King of Navarre, and his execution of the Count of Har- 
court, who was looked upon as the adviser of Charles in 
his policy of intrigue, stirred a generalrising throughout 
Normandy, Edward at once despatched troops under 
the Duke of Lancaster to its support. But the insur- 
gents were soon forced to fall back. Conscious of the 
danger to which an English occupation of Normandy 
would expose him, John hastened with a large army to 
the west, drove Lancaster to Cherbourg, took Evreux, 
and besieged Breteuil. 

Here, however, his progress was suddenly checked by 
news from.the south. The Black Prince, as the hero of 
Cregy was called, had landed in Guienne during the 
preceding year and won a disgraceful success. Unable 
to pay his troops, he staved off their demands by a cam- 
paign of sheer pillage. While plague and war and the 
anarchy which sprang up under the weak government of 
John were bringing ruin on the northern and central 
provinces of France, the south remained prosperous and 
at peace. ‘The young prince led his army of freebooters 
up the Garonne into “ what was before one of the fat 
countries of the world, the people good and simple, who. 
~ did not know what war was; indeed no war had been 
waged against them till the Prince came. The English 
and Gascons found the country full and gay, the rooms 
adorned with carpets and draperies, the caskets full of 
fair Jewels. But nothing was safe from these robbers. 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 409 


They, and especially the Gascons, who are very greedy, 
carried off everything.” Glutted by the sack of Careas- 
sone and Narbonne the plunderers fell back to Bordeaux, 
“their horses so laden with spoil that they could hardly 
move.” Worthier work awaited the Black Prince in the 
following year. In the plan of campaign for 1356 it had 
been arranged that he should march upon the Loire, and 
there unite with a force under the Duke of Lancaster 
which was to land in Britanny and push rapidly into the 
heart of France. Delays, however, hindered the Prince 
from starting from Bordeaux till July, and when his 
march brought him to the Loire the plan of campaign 
had already broken down. The outbreak in Normandy 
had tempted the English Council to divert the force 
under Lancaster from Britanny to that province; and 
the Duke was now at Cherbourg, hard pressed by the 
French army under John. Butif its original purpose was 
foiled, the march of the Black Prince on the Loire served 
still more effectively the English cause. His advance 
pointed straight upon Paris, and again, asin the Crecy 
campaign, John was forced to leave all for the protection 
of the capital. Hasty marches brought the King to the 
Loire, while Prince Edward still lay at Vierzon on the 
Cher. Unconscious of John’s designs, he wasted some 
days in the capture of Romorantin, while the French 
troops were crossing the Loire along its course from 
Orleans to Tours, and John, with the advance, was hurry- 
ing through Loches upon Poitiers in pursuit, as he sup- 
posed, of the retreating Englishmen. But the move- 
ment of the French army, near as it was, was unknown 
in the English camp, and when the news of it forced 
the Black Prince to order a retreat the enemy was already 
far ahead of him. Edward reached the fields north of 
Poitiers to find his line of retreat cut off and a French 
army of sixty thousand men interposed between his 
forces and Bordeaux. 

If the Prince had shown little ability in his manage- 
ment of the campaign, he showed tactical skill in the 
fight which was now forced on him. On the nine- 
teenth of September he took a strong position in the 


410 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


fields of Maupertuis, where his front was covered by thick 
hedges and approachable only by a deep and narrow lane 
which ran between vineyards. The vineyards and 
hedges he lined. with bowmen, and drew up his small 
body of men-at-arms at the point where the lane opened 
upon the higher plain on which he was himself encamped. 
Edward’s force numbered only eight thousand men, and 
the danger was great enough to force him to offer in ex- 
change for a free retreat the surrender of his prisoners 
and of the places he had taken, with an oath not to fight 
against France for seven years to come. © His offers, how- 
ever, were rejected, and the battle opened with a charge 
of three hundred French knights up the narrow lane. 
But the lane was soon choked with men and horses, while 
the front ranks of the advancing army fell back before a 
galling fire of arrows from the hedgerows. In this mo- 
ment of confusion a body of English horsemen, posted 
unseen by their opponents on a hill to the right, charged 
suddenly on the French flank, and the Prince, watching 
the disorder which was caused by the repulse and sur- 
prise, fell boldly on their front. The steady shot of the 
English archers completed the panic produced by this 
sudden attack. The first French line was driven in, and 
on its rout the second, a force of sixteen thousand men, 
at once broke in wild terror and fled from the field. 
John still held his ground with the knights of the re- 
serve, whom he had unwisely ordered to dismount from 
their horses, till a charge of the Black Prince with two 
thousand lances threw this vast body into confusion. The 
French King was taken, desperately fighting, and when 
his army poured back at noon in utter rout to the gates 
of Poitiers, eight thousand of their number had fallen on 
the field, three thousand in the flight, and two thousand 
men-at-arms, with a crowd of nobles, were taken pris- 
oners. The royal captive entered London in triumph, 
mounted on a big white charger, while the Prince rode 
by his side on a little black hackney to the palace of the 
Savoy which was chosen as John’s dwelling, and a truce 
for two years seemed to give healing-time to France. 
With the Scots Edward the Third had less good for- 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 411 


tune. Recalled from Calais by their seizure of Berwick, 
the King induced Balliol to resign into his hands his 
shadowy sovereignty, and in the spring of 1356 marched 
upon Edinburgh with an overpowering army, harrying 
and burning as he marched. But the Scots refused an 
engagement, a fleet sent with provisions was beaten off 
by a storm, and the famine-stricken army was forced to 
fall rapidly back on the border in a disastrous retreat. 
The trial convinced Edward that the conquest of Scot- 
land was impossible, and by a rapid change of policy 
which marks the man he resolved to seek the friendship 
of the country he had wasted so long. David Bruce was 
released on promise of ransom, a truce concluded for ten 
years, and the prohibition of trade between the two king- 
doms put an end to. But the fulness of this reconcilia- 
tion screened a dexterous intrigue. David was childless 
and Edward availed himself of the difficulty which the 
young King experienced in finding means of providing 
the sum demanded for his ransom to bring him over to a 
proposal which would have united the two countries for- 
ever. The scheme, however, was carefully concealed ; 
and it was not till 1863 that David proposed to his Par- 
hament to set aside on his death the claims of the Stew- 

e ard of Scotland to his crown, and to choose Edward’s 
third son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, as his successor. 
Though the proposal was scornfully rejected, negotiations 
were still carried on between the two Kings for the re- 
alization of the project, and were probably only put an 
end to by the calamities of Edward’s later years. 

In France misery and misgovernment seemed to be 
doing Edward’s work more effectively than arms. The 
miserable country found no rest in itself. Its routed 
soldiery turned into free companies of bandits, while the 
lords captured at Crecy or Poitiers procured the sums 
needed for their ransom by extortion from the peasantry- 
The reforms demanded by the States-General which met 
in this agony of France were frustrated by the treachery 
of the Regent, John’s eldest son Charles, Duke of Nor 
mandy, till Paris, impatient of his weakness and misrule, 
rose in arms against the Crown. The peasants too, driven 


412 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


mad vy oppression and famine, rose in wild insurrection, 
butchering their lords and firing their castles over the 
whole face of France. Paris and the Jacquerie, as this 
peasant rising was called, were at last crushed by treach- 
ery and the sword: and, exhausted as it was, France still 
backed the Regent in rejecting a treaty of peace by which 
John, in 1859, proposed to buy his release. By this treaty 
Maine, Touraine and Poitou in the south, Normandy, 
Guisnes, Ponthieu, and Calais in the west were ceded to 
the English King. On its rejection Edward, in 16380, 
poured ravaging over the wasted land. Famine, however, 
proved its best defence. ‘I could not believe,” said 
Petrarch of this time, “ that this was the same France 
which I had seen so rich and flourishing. Nothing pre- 
sented itself to my eyes but a fearful solitude, an utter 
poverty, land uncultivated, houses in ruins. Even the 
neighborhood of Paris showed everywhere marks of deso- 
lation and conflagration. The streets are deserted, the 
roads overgrown with weeds, the whole is a vast solitude.” 
The utter desolation forced Edward to carry with him 
an immense train of provisions, and thousands of baggage 
wagons with mills, ovens, forges, and fishing-boats, formed 
along train which streamed for six miles behind his army. 
After a fruitless attempt upon Rheims he forced the 
Duke of Burgundy to conclude a treaty with him by push- 
ing forward to Tonnerre, and then descending the Seine 
appeared with his army before Paris. But the wasted 
country forbade a siege, and Edward, after summoning 
the town in vain, was forced to fall back for subsistence 
on the Loire. It was during this march that the Duke 
of Normandy’s envoys overtook him with proposals of 
peace. The misery of the land had at last bent Charles 
to submission, andin May a treaty was concluded at Bre- 
tigny, a small place to the eastward of Chartres. By 
this treaty the English king waived his claims on the 
crown of France and on the Duchy of Normandy. On 
the other hand, his Duchy of Aquitaine, which included 
Gascony, Guienne, Poitou, and Saintonge, the Limousin 
and the Angoumois, Perigord and the counties of Bigorre 
and Rouerque, was not only restored but free from its 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 413 


obligations as a French fief and granted in full sov- 
ereignty with Ponthieu, Edward’s heritage from the sec- 
ond wife of Edward the First, as well as with Guisnes and 
his new conquest of Calais. 

The Peace of Bretigny set its seal upon Edward’s glory. 
But within England itself the misery of the people was 
deepening every hour. Men believed the world to be end- 
ing, and the judgment day to be near. A few months 
after the Peace came a fresh swoop of the Black Death, 
carrying off the Duke of Lancaster. The repressive 
measures of Parliament and the landowners only widened 
the social chasm which parted employer from employed. 
We can see the growth of a fierce spirit of resistance 
both to the reactionary efforts which were being made 
to bring back labor services and to the enactments which 
again bound labor to the soil in statutes which strove 
in vain to repress the strikes and combinations which 
became frequent in the towns and the more formidable 
gatherings of villeins and “ fugitive serfs ” in the country 
at large. A statute of later date throws hght on the nature 
of the resistance of the last. It tells us that * villeins and 
holders of land in villeinage withdrew their customs and 
services from their lords, having attached themselves to 
other persons who maintained and abetted them, and 
who under color of exemplifications from Domesday of 
the manors and villages where they dwelt claimed to be 
quit of all manner of services either of their body or of 
their lands, and would suffer no distress or other course 
of justice tobe taken against them; the villeins aiding 
their maintainers by threatening the officers of their lords 
with peril to life and limb as well by open assemblies as 
confederacies to support each other.” It would seem 
not only as if the villein was striving to resist the reac- 
tionary tendency of the lords of manors to regain his 
labor seryice but that in the general overturning of 
social institutions the copyholder was struggling to 
make himself a freeholder, and the farmer to be recog- 
nized as proprietor of the demesne he held on lease. 

A more terrible outcome of the general suffering was 
seen in a new revolt against the whole system of social 


414 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


inequality which had till then passed unquestioned as 
the divine order of the world. The Peace was hardly 
signed when the ery of the poor found a terrible utter- 
ance in the words of ‘a mad priest of Kent” as the 
courtly Froissart calls him, who for twenty years to come 
found audience for his sermons in spite of interdict and 
imprisonment in the stout yeomen who gathered round 
him in the church-yards of Kent. “ Mad” as the landowners: 
held him to be, it was in the preaching of John Ball that 
England first listened to a declaration of the natural 
equality and rights of man. ‘Good people,” cried the 
preacher, “things will never be well in England so long 
as goods be not in common, and so long as there be vil- 
leins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we 
call lords greater folk than we? On what grounds have 
they deserved it? Whydo they hold us in serfage? If 
we all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and 
Eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than 
we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our 
toil what they spend in their pride? They are clothed 
in velvet and warm in their furs and their ermines, while 
we are covered with rags. They have wine and spices 
and fair bread ; and we oat-cake and ‘straw, and water to 
drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain 
and labor, the rain and the wind in the fields. And yet 
it is of us and of our toil that these men hold their state.” 
It was the tyranny of property that then as ever roused 
the defiance of socialism. A spirit fatal to the whole 
system of the Middle Ages breathed in the popular rime 
which condensed the levelling doctrine of John Ball: 


‘When Adam delved and Eve span, 
Who was then the gentleman ?”’ 


More impressive, because of the very restraint and 
moderation of its tone, is the poem in which William 
Longland began at the same moment to embody with a 
terrible fidelity all the darker and sterner aspects of the 
time, its social revolt, its moral and religious awakening, 
the misery of the poor, the selfishness and corruption of 
the rich. Nothing brings more vividly home to us the 


THE PARLIAMENT. 18C7—1461. 415 


social chasm which in the fourteenth 2entury severed the 
rich from the poor than the contrast between his ‘ Com- 
plaint of Piers the Ploughman ” and the “ Canterbury 
Tales.’ The world of wealth and ease and laughter 
through which the courtly Chaucer moves with eyes 
downcast as in a pleasant dream is a far off world of 
wrong and of ungodliness to the gaunt poet of the poor. 
Born probably in Shropshire, where he had been put to 
school and received minor orders as a clerk, “ Long Will,” 
as Longland was nicknamed from his tall stature, found 
his way at an early age to London, and earned a miser- 
able livelihood there by singing “ placebos” and * diriges”’ 
in the stately funerals of his day. Men took the moody 
clerk for a madman; his bitter poverty quickened the 
defiant pride that made him loath, as he tells us, to bow to 
the gay lords and dames who rode decked in silver and 
minivere along the Cheap or to exchange a “ God save 
you” with the law sergeants as he passed their new 
house in the Temple. His world is the world of the 
poor: he dwells on the poor man’s life, on his hunger 
and toil, his rough revelry and his despair, with the nar- 
row intensity of a man who has no outlook beyond it. 
The narrowness, the misery, the monotony of the life he 
paints reflect themselves in his verse. It is only here and 
there that a love of nature or a grim earnestness of wrath 
quickens his rime into poetry; there is not a gleam of 
the bright human sympathy of Chaucer, of his fresh de- 
light in the gayety, the tenderness, the daring of the 
world about him, of his picturesque sense of even its 
coarsest contrasts, of his delicate irony, of his courtly wit. 
The cumbrous allegory, the tedious platitudes, the rimed 
texts from Scripture which form the staple of Longland’s 
work, are only broken here and there by phrases of a 
shrewd common sense, by bitter outbursts, by pictures 
of a broad Hogarthian humor. What chains one to the 
poem is its deep undertone of sadness: the world is out 
of joint, and the gaunt rimer who stalks silently along 
the Strand has no faith in his power to put it right. 
Londoner as he is, Will’s fancy flies far from the sin 
and suffering of the great city to a May-morning in the 


416 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Malvern Hills. “I was very forwandered and went me 
to rest under a broad bank by a burn side, and as I lay 
and leaned and looked in the water I slumbered in a 
sleeping, it sweyved (sounded) so merry.” Just as 
Chaucer gathers the typical figures of the world he 
saw into his pilgrim train, so the dreamer gathers into a 
wide field his army of traders and chafferers, of hermits 
and solitaries, of minstrels, “japers and jinglers,” bid- 
ders and beggars, ploughmen that “in setting and in 
sowing swonken (toil) full hard,” pilgrims ‘ with their 
wenches after,’ weavers and laborers, burgess and bond- 
man, lawyer and scrivener, court-haunting bishops, friars, 
and pardoners ‘ parting the silver” with the parish priest. 
Their pilgrimage is not to Canterbury but to Truth; their 
euide to Truth neither clerk nor priest but Peterkin the 
Ploughman, whom they find ploughing in his field. He 
it is who bids the knight no more wrest gifts from his 
tenant nor misdo with the poor. ‘ Though he be thine 
underling here, well may hap in heaven that he be 
worthier set and with more bliss than thou. . . . For in 
charnel at church churles be evil to know, or a knight 
from a knave there.” The gospel of quality is backed 
by the gospel of labor. The aim of the Ploughman is to 
work, and to make the world work with him. He warns 
the laborer as he warns the knight. Hunger is God's 
instrument in bringing the idlest to, toil, and Hunger 
waits to work her will on the idler and the waster. On 
the eve of the great struggle between wealth and labor, 
Longland stands alone in his fairness to both, in his 
shrewd political and religious common sense. In the 
face of the popular hatred which was to gather round 
John of Gaunt, he paints the Duke ina famous apologue 
as the cat who, greedy as she might be, at any rate keeps 
the noble rats from utterly devouring the mice of the 
people. Though the poet is loyal to the Church, he pro- 
claims a righteous life to be better than a host of indul- 
gvences, and God sends His pardon to Piers when priests 
dispute it. But he sings as a man conscious of his 
loneliness and without hope. It is only ina dream that 
he sees Corruption, “ Lady Mead,” brought to trial, and 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1807—1461. 417 


the world repenting at the preaching of Reason. In the 
waking life reason finds no listeners. The poet himself 
is looked upon — he tells us bitterly — as a madman. 
There is a terrible despair in the close of his later poem, 
where the triumph of Christ is only followed by the 
reign of Antichrist; where Contrition slumbers amidst 
the revel of Death incl Sin; and Conscience, hard beset 
by Pride and Sloth, rouses himself with a last effort, and 
seizing his pilgrim staff, wanders over the world to find 
Piers Ploughman. | 
The strife indeed which Longland would have averted 
raged only the fiercer as the dark years went by. If the 
Statutes of Laborers were powerless for their immediate 
ends, either in reducing the actual rate of wages or in 
restricting the mass of floating labor to definite areas of 
employment, they proved effective in sowing hatred be- 
tween employer and employed, between rich and _ poor. 
But this social rift was not the only rift which was open- 
ing amidst the distress and misery of the time. The 
close of William Longland’s poem is the prophecy of a 
religious revolution; and the way for such a revolution 
was being paved by the growing bitterness of strife be- | 
tween England and the Papacy. In spite of the sharp 
protests from king and parliament the need for money at 
Avignon was too great to allow any relaxation in the 
Papal claims. Almost on the eve of Crecy Edward took 
the decisive step of forbidding the entry into England of 
any Papal bulls or documents interfering with the rights 
of presentation belonging to private patrons. But the 
tenacity of Rome was far from loosening its grasp on this 
source of revenue for all Edward’s protests. Crecy, how- 
ever, gave a new boldness to the action of the state, and 
a’ Statute of Provisors was passed by the Parliament in 
1351 which again asserted the rights of the English 
Church, and enacted that all who infringed them by the 
introduction of Papal “ provisors” should suffer impris- 
onment. But resistance to provisors only brought fresh 
vexations. The patrons who withstood a Papal nominee 
in the name of the law were summoned to defend them- 
selves in the Papal Court. From that moment the 
20 


418 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


supremacy of the Papal law over the law of the land be- 
came a great question in which the lesser question of pro- 
visors merged. The pretension of the Court of Avignon 
was met in 1358 by a statute which forbade any ques- 
tioning of judgments rendered in the king’s courts or 
any prosecution of a suit in foreign courts under pain of 
outlawry, perpetual imprisonment, or banishment from 
the land. It was this act of Preemunire—as it came in 
after renewals to be called—which furnished so terrible a 
weapon to the Tudors in their later strife with Rome. 
But the papacy paid little heed to these warnings, and 
its obstinacy in still receiving suits and appeals in de- 
fiance of this statute roused the pride of a conquering 
people. England was still fresh from her glory at Bre- 
tigny when Edward appealed to the Parliament of 1365. 
Complaints, he said, were constantly being made by his 
subjects to the Pope as to matters which were cognizable 
in the King’s courts. The practice of provisors was thus 
maintained in the teeth of the laws, and “the laws, 
usages, ancient customs, and franchises of his kingdom 
were thereby much hindered, the King’s crown degraded, 
and his person defamed.” ‘The King’s appeal was hotly 
met. “ Biting words,’ which it was thought wise to sup- 
press, were used in the debate which followed, and the 
statutes against provisors and appeals were solemnly con- 
firmed. 

What gave point to this challenge was the assent of 
the prelates to the proceedings of the Parliament; and 
the pride of Urban V.at once met it by a counter-defiance. 
He demanded with threats the payment of the annual 
sum of a thousand marks promised by King John in ac- 
knowledgment of the suzerainty of the See of Rome. 
The insult roused the temper of the realm. The King 
laid the demand before Parliament, and both houses 
replied that “ neither King John nor any king could put 
himself, his kingdom, nor his people under subjection 
save with their accord or assent.” John’s submission 
had been made “without their assent and against his 
coronation oath,” and they pledged themselves, should 
the Pope attempt to enforce his claim, to resist him with 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—-1461. 419 


all their power. Even Urban shrank from imperilling 
the Papacy by any further demands, and the claim to a 
Papal lordship over England was never again heard of. 
But the struggle had brought to the front a man who 
was destined to give a far wider scope and significance to 
this resistance to Rome than any as yet dreamed of. 
Nothing is more remarkable than the contrast between 
the obscurity of John Wyelif’s earlier life and the fulness 
and vividness of our knowledge of him during the twenty 
years which preceded its close. Born in the earlier part — 
of the fourteenth century, he had already passed middle 
age when he was appointed to the mastership of Balliol 
College, in the University of Oxford, and recognized as 
first among the schoolmen of his day. Of all the scho- 
lastic doctors those of England had been throughout the 
keenest and most daring in philosophical speculation. A 
reckless audacity and love of novelty was the common 
note of Bacon, Duns Scotus, and Ockham, as against the 
sober and more disciplined learning of the Parisian 
schoolmen, Albert and Thomas Aquinas. The decay of 
the University of Paris during the English wars was 
transferring her intellectual supremacy to Oxford, and in 
Oxford Wyclif stood without a rival. From his pre- 
decessor, Bradwardine, whose work as a scholastic teacher 
he earried on in the speculative treatises he published 
during this period, he inherited the tendency to a pre- 
destinarian Augustinianism which formed the ground- 
work of his later theological revolt. His debt to Ock- 
ham revealed itself in his earliest efforts at Church 
reform. Undismayed by the thunder and excommunica- 
tions of the Church, Ockham had supported the Emperor 
Lewis of Bavaria in his recent struggle, and he had not 
shrunk in his enthusiasm for the Empire from attacking 
the foundations of the Papal supremacy or from asserting 
the rights of the civil power. The spare, emaciated 
frame of Wyclif, weakened by study and asceticism, 
hardly promised a reformer who would carry on the 
stormy work of Ockham ; but within this frail form lay 
a temper quick and restless, an immense energy, an Im- 
movable conviction, an unconquerable pride. The per- 


420 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


sonal charm which ever accompanies real greatness only 
deepened the influence he derived from the spotless 
purity of his life. As yet indeed even Wyclif himself 
can hardly have suspected the immense range of his in- 
tellectual power. It was only the struggle that lay 
before him which revealed in the dry and subtle school- 
man the founder of our later English prose, a master of 
popular invective, of irony, of persuasion, a dexterous 
politician, an audacious partisan, the organizer of a re- 
ligious order, the unsparing assailant of abuses, the 
boldest and most indefatigable of controversialists, the 
first Reformer who dared, when deserted and alone, to 
question and deny the creed of the Christendom around 
him, to break through the tradition of the past, and with 
his last breath to assert the freedom of religious thought 
against the dogmas of the Papacy. 

At the moment of the quarrel with Pope Urban, how- 
ever, Wyclif was far from having advanced to such a . 
position as this. As the most prominent of English 
scholars it was natural that he should come forward in 
defence of the independence and freedom of the English 
Church; and he published a formal refutation of the 
claims advanced by the Papacy to deal at its will with 
church property in the form of a report of the Parlia- 
mentary debates which we have described. As yet his 
quarrel was not with the doctrines of Rome but with its 
practices ; and it was on the principles of Ockham that 
he defended the Parliament’s refusal of the “tribute” 
which was claimed by Urban. But his treatiseon “ The 
Kingdom of God,” “De Dominio Divino,” which can 
hardly have been written later than 1368, shows the 
breadth of the ground he was even now prepared to take 
up. In this, the most famous of his works, Wyclif bases 
his argument on a distinct ideal of society. All author- 
ity, to use his own expression, is “founded in grace.” 
Dominion in the highest sense is in God alone; it is God 
who as the suzerain of the universe deals ouf His rule 
in fief to rulers in their various stations on tenure of 
their obedience to himself. It was easy to objeet that 
in such a case “dominion” could never exist, since 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 471 


mortal sin is a breach of such a tenure, and all men sin. 
But, as Wyclif urged it, the theory is a purely ideal one. 
In actual practice he distinguishes between dominion 
and power, power which the wicked may have by God’s 
permission, and to which the Christian must submit from 
motives of obedience to God. In his own scholastic 
phrase, so strangely perverted afterwards, here on earth 
“God must obey the devil.” But whether in the ideal 
or practical view of the matter all power and dominion 
was of God. It was granted by Him not to one person, 
His Vicar on earth, as the Papacy alleged, but to all.. 
The King was as truly God’s Vicar as the Pope. The 
royal power was as sacred as the ecclesiastical, and as 
complete over temporal things, even over the temporal- 
ities of the Church, as that of the Church over spiritual 
things. So far as the question of Church and State 
therefore was concerned the distinction between the 
ideal and practical view of “dominion” was of little ac- 

count. Wyclif’s application of the theory to the indi- 
vidual conscience was of far higher and wider importance. 
Obedient as each Christian might be to king or priest, 
he himself, as a possessor of “dominion,” held immedi- 

ately of God. The throne of God Himself was the tri- 

bunal of personal appeal. What the Reformers of the 

sixteenth century attempted to do by their theory of 
Justification by Faith Wyclif attempted to do by his 

theory of Dominion, a theory which, in establishing a di- 
rect relation between man and God, swept away the 

whole basis of a mediating priesthood, the very founda- 
tion on which the medieval church was built. 

As yet the full bearing of these doctrines was little 
seen. But the social and religious excitement which we 
have described was quickened by the renewal of the war, 
and the general suffering and discontent gathered bitter- 
ness when the success which had flushed England with a 
new and warlike pride passed into a long series of dis- 
asters in which men forgot the glories of Crecy and 
Poitiers. Triumph as it seemed, the treaty of Bretigny 
was really fatal to Edward’s cause in the south of France. 
By the cession of Aquitaine to him in full sovereignty 


422, HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the traditional claim on which his strength rested lost its 
force. The people of the south had clung to their Duke, 
even though their Duke was a foreign ruler. They had 
stubbornly resisted incorporation with Northern France. 
While preserving, however, their traditional fealty to the 
descendants of Eleanor they still clung to the equally 
traditional suzerainty of the Kings of France. But the 
treaty of Bretigny not only severed them from the realm 
of France, it subjected them to the realm of England. 
Edward ceased to be their hereditary Duke, he became 
simply an English king ruling Aquitaine as an English 
dominion. If the Southerners loved the North-French 
little, they loved the English less, and the treaty which 
thus changed their whole position was followed by a 
a quick revulsion of feeling from the Garonne to the 
Pyrenees. ‘The Gascon nobles declared that John had 
no right to transfer their fealty to another and to sever 
them from the realm of France. The city of Rochelle 
prayed the French King not to release it from its fealty 
to him. “ We will obey the English with our lips,” said 
its citizens, ‘* but our hearts shall never be moved towards 
them.’ Edward strove to meet this passion for local in- 
dependence, this hatred of being ruled from London, by 
sending the Black Prince to Bordeaux and investing 
him, in 1862, with the Duchy of Aquitaine. But the new 
Duke held his Duchy as a fief from the English King, ; 
and the grievance of the Southerners was left un- 

touched. Charles V., who succeeded his father John 
in 1364, silently prepared to reap this harvest of dis- 
content. Patient, wary, unscrupulous, he was hardly 
crowned before he put an end to the war which had gone 
on without a pause in Britanny by accepting homage 
from the claimant whom France had hitherto opposed. 
Through Bertrand du Guesclin, a fine soldier whom his 
sagacity had discovered, he forced the King of Navarre 
to a peace which closed the fighting in Normandy. A 
more formidable difficulty in the way of pacification and 
order lay in the Free Companies, a union of marauders 
whom the disbanding of both armies after the peace had 
set free to harry the wasted land, and whom the King’s 


aa 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 493 


military resources were insufficient to cope with. Itwas 
the stroke by which Charles cleared his realm of these 
scourges which forced on a new struggle with the Eng- 
lish in the south. 

In the judgment of the English court the friendship 
of Castille was of the first importance for the security of 
Aquitaine. Spain was the strongest naval power of the 
western world, and not only would the ports of Guienne 
be closed but its communication with England would be 
at once cut off by the appearance of a joint French and 
Spanish fleet in the Channel. It was with satisfaction, 
therefore, that Edward saw the growth of a bitter hostil- 
ity between Charles and the Castilian King, Pedro the 
Cruel, through the murder of his wife, Blanche of Bour- 
bon, the French King’s sister-in-law. Henry of Trasta- 
mara, a bastard son of Pedro’s father Alfonso the 
Eleventh, had long been a refugee at the French court, 
and soon after the treaty of Bretigny Charles, in his de- 
sire to revenge this murder on Pedro, gave Henry aid in 
an attempt on the Castilian throne. It was impossible 
for England to look on with indifference while a depend- 
ant of the French King became master of Castille ; and 
in 1362 a treaty offensive and defensive was concluded 
between Pedro and Edward the Third. The time was 
not come for open war; but the subtle policy of Charles 
saw in this strife across the Pyrenees an opportunity 
both of detaching Castille from the English cause and of 
ridding himself of the Free Companies. With charac- 
teristic caution he dexterously held himself in the back- 
ground while he made use of the Pope, who had been 
threatened by the Free Companies in his palace at 
Avignon, and was as anxious to get rid of them as him- 
self. Pedro’s cruelty, misgovernment, and alliance with 
the Moslem of Cordova, served as grounds for a crusade 
which was proclaimed by Pope Urban; and Du Gues- 
clin, who was placed at the head of the expedition, found 
in the Papal treasury and in the hope of booty from an 
unrayvaged land means of gathering the marauders round 
his standard. As soon as these Crusaders crossed the 
Ebro Pedro was deserted by his subjects, and in 13866 


494 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Henry of Trastamara saw himself crowned without a 
strugele at Burgos, as King of Castille. Pedro with his 
two daughters fled for shelter to Bordeaux, and claimed 
the aid promised in the treaty. The lords of Aquitaine 
shrank from fighting for such a cause, but in spite of 
their protests and the reluctance of the English council 
to embark in so distant a struggle, Edward held that he 
had no choice save to replace his ally, for to leave Henry 
seated on the throne was to leave Aquitaine to be 
crushed between France and Castille. 

The after course of the war proved that in his antici- 
pations of the fatal result of a combination of the two 
powers Edward was right, but his policy jarred not only 
against the nniversal craving for rest, but against the 
moral sense of the world. ‘The Black Prince, however, 
proceeded to carry out his father’s design in tne teeth of 
the general opposition. His call to arms robbed Henry 
of the aid of those English Companies who had marched 
till now with the rest of the crusaders, but who returned 
at once to the standard of the Prince; the passes of 
Navarre were opened with gold, and in the beginning of 
1367 the English army crossed the Pyrenees. Advanc- 
ing to the Ebro the Prince offered battle at Navarete 
with an army already reduced by famine and disease in 
its terrible winter march, and Henry with double his 
numbers at once attacked him. But in spite of the 
obstinate courage of the Castilian troops the discipline 
and skill of the English soldiers once more turned the 
wavering day into a victory. Du Guesclin was taken, 
Henry fled across the Pyrenees, and Pedro was again 
seated on his throne. The pay, however, which he had 
promised was delayed ; and the Prince, whose army had 
been thinned by disease to a fifth of its numbers, and 
whose strength never recovered from the hardships of 
this campaign, fell back sick and beggared to Aquitaine. 
He had hardly returned when his work was undone. In 
1368 Henry re-entered Castille; its towns threw open 
their gates; a general rising chased Pedro from the 
throne, and a final battle in the spring of 13869 saw his 
utter overthrow. His murder by Henry’s hand left the 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 425 


bastard undisputed master of Castille. Meanwhile the 
Black Prince, sick and disheartened, was hampered at 
Bordeaux by the expenses of the campaign which Pedro 
had left unpaid. To defray his debt he was driven, in 
1368, to lay a hearth-tax on Aquitaine, and the tax 
served as a pretext for an outbreak of the long-hoarded 
discontent. Charles was now ready for open action. 
He had won over the most powerful among the Gascon 
nobles, and their influence secured the rejection of the 
tax in a Parliament of the province which met at Bor- 
deaux. The Prince, pressed by debt, persisted against 
the counsel of his wisest advisers in exacting it; and the 
lords of Aquitaine at once appealed to the King of 
France. Such an appeal was a breach of the treaty of 
Bretigny in which the French King had renounced his 
sovereignty over the south; but Charles had craftily de- 
layed year after year the formal execution of the renun- 
ciations stipulated in the treaty, and he was still able to 
treat it as not binding on him. The success of Henry of 
Trastamara decided him to take immediate action, and 
in 1869 he summoned the Black Prince as Duke of 
Aquitaine to meet the appeal of the Gascon lords in his 
court. 

The Prince was maddened by the summons. “TI will 
come,” he replied, “but with helmet on head, and with 
sixty thousand men at my back.” War, however, had 
hardly been declared when the ability with which 
Charles had laid his plans was seen in his seizure of Pon- 
thieu and in a rising of the whole country south of the 
Garonne. Du Guesclin returned in 1370 from Spain to 
throw life into the French attack. Two armies entered 
Guienne from the east; anda hundred castles with La 
Reole and Limoges threw open their gates to Du Guesclin. 
But the march of an English army from Calais upon 
Paris recalled him from the south to guard the capital 
at a moment when the English leader advanced to re- 
cover Limoges, and the Black Prince borne in a litter to 
its walls stormed the town and sullied by a merciless 
massacre of its inhabitants the fame of his earlier ex- 
ploits. Sickness, however, recalled him home in the spring 


426 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


of 1371; and the war, protracted by the caution of 
Charles, who forbad his armies to engage, did little but 
exhaust the energy and treasure of England. As yet 
indeed the French attack had made small impression on 
the south, where the English troops stoutly held their 
ground against Du Guesclin’s inroads. But the pro- 
tracted war drained Edward's resources, while the 
diplomacy of Charles was busy in rousing fresh dangers 
from Scotland and Castille. It wasin vain that Edward 
looked for allies to the Flemish towns. The male line 
of the Counts of Flanders ended in Count Louis le Male; 
and the marriage of his daughter Margaret with Philip, 
Duke of Burgundy, a younger brother of the French 
King, secured Charles from attack along his northern 
border. In Scotland the death of David Bruce put an 
end to Edward’s schemes for a reunion of the two king- 
doms; and his successor, Robert the Steward, renewed 
in 1371 the alliance with France. 

Castille was a yet more serious danger; and an effort 
which Edward made to neutralize its attack only forced 
Henry of Trastamara to fling his whole weight into the 
struggle. The two daughters of Pedro had remained 
since their father’s flight at Bordeaux. The elder of 
these was now wedded to John of Gaunt, Edward’s 
fourth son, whom he had created Duke of Lancaster on 
his previous marriage with Blanche, a daughter of Henry 
of Lancaster and the heiress of that house, while the 
younger was wedded to Edward’s fifth son, the Earl of 
Cambridge. Edward’s aim was that of raising again the 
party of King Pedro and giving Henry of Trastamara 
work to do at home which would hinder his interposition 
in the war of Guienne. It was with this view that John 
of Gaunt on his marriage took the title of King of Cas- 
tille. But no adherent of Pedro’s cause stirredin Spain, 
and Henry replied to the challenge by sending a Spanish 
fleet to the Channel. A decisive victory which this fleet 
won over an English convoy off Rochelle proved a fatal 
blow to the English cause. It wrested from Edward the 
mastery of the seas, and cut off all communication be- 
tween England and Guienne. Charles was at once 


THE PARLIAMENT, 1307—1461. 427 


roused to new exertions. Poitou, Saintonge, and the 
Angoumois yielded to his general Du Guesclin; and 
Rochelle was surrendered by its citizens in 1572. ‘The 
next year saw a desperate attempt to restore the for- 
tune of the English arms. <A great army under John of 
Gaunt penetrated into the heart of France. But it found 
no foe to engage. Charles had forbidden any fighting. 
“Tf a storm rages over the land,” said the King coolly, 
‘it disperses of itself; and so will it be with the Eng- 
lish.” Winter in fact overtook the Duke of Lancaster | 
in the mountains of Auvergne, and a mere fragment of 
his host reached Bordeaux. ‘The failure of this attack 
was the signal for a general defection, and ere the sum- 
mer of 1374 had closed the two towns of Bordeaux and 
Bayonne were all that remained of the English posses- 
sions in Southern France. Even these were only saved 
by the exhaustion of the conquerors. The treasury of 
Charles was as utterly drained as the treasury of Edward ; 
and the Kings were forced to a truce. 

Only fourteen years had gone by since the Treaty of 
Bretigny raised England to a height of glory such as it 
had never known before. But the years had been years 
of a shame and suffering which stung the people to mad- 
ness. Never had England fallen so low. Her con- 
quests were lost, her shores insulted, her commerceswept 
from the seas. Within she was drained by the taxation 
and bloodshed of the war. Its popularity had wholly 
died away. When the Commons were asked in 1354 
whether they would assent to a treaty of perpetual peace 
if they might have it, “ the said Commons responded all, 
and all together, ‘Yes, yes!’” The population was 
thinned by the ravages of pestilence, for till 1869, which 
saw its last visitation, the Black Death returned again 
and again. The social strife too gathered bitterness with 
every effort at repression. It was in vain that Parlia- 
ment after Parliament increased the severity of its laws. 
The demands of the Parliament of 1376 show how in- 
operative the previous Statutes of Laborers had proved. 
They prayed that constables be directed to arrest all who 
infringed the Statute, that no laborer should be allowed 


428 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


to take refuge in a town and become an artisan if there 
were need of his service in the county from which he 
came, and that the King would protect lords and em- 
ployers against the threats of death uttered by serfs who 
refused to serve. ‘The reply of the Royal Council shows 
that statesmen at any rate were beginning to feel that 
repression might be pushed too far. The King refused 
to interfere by any further and harsher provisions be- 
tween employers and employed, and left cases of breach 
of law to be dealt with in his ordinary courts of justice. 
On the one side he forbade the threatening gatherings 
which were already common in the country, but on the 
other he forbade the illegal exactions of the employers. 
- With sucha reply, however, the proprietary class were 
hardly likely to be content. Two years later the Parlia- 
ment of Gloucester called for a Fugitive-slave Law, 
which would have enabled lords to seize their serfs in 
whatever county or town they found refuge, and in 1379 
they prayed that judges might be sent five times a year 
into every shire to enforce the Statute of Laborers. 

But the strife between employers and employed was 
not the only rift which was opening in the social structure. 
Suffering and defeat had stripped off the veil which hid 
from the nation the shallow and selfish temper of Edward 
the Third. His profligacy was now bringing him toa 
premature old age. He was sinking into the tool of his 
ministers and his mistresses. The glitter and profusion 
of his court, his splendid tournaments, his feasts, his 
Table Round, his new order of chivalry, the exquisite 
chapel of St. Stephen whose frescoed walls were the glory 
of his palace at Westminster, the vast keep which crowned 
the hill of Windsor, had ceased to throw their glamour 
round a King who tricked his Parhament and swindled 
his creditors. Edward paid no debts. He had ruined 
the wealthiest bankers of Florence by a cool act of bank- 
ruptey. The sturdier Flemish burghers only wrested 
payment from him by holding his royal person as their 
security. His ownsubjects fared no better than foreigners. 
The prerogative of “purveyance,” by which the King in 
his progresses through the country had the right of first 


alte PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 499 . 


purchase of all that he needed at fair market price, became 
a galling oppression in the hands of a bankrupt King who 
was always moving from place to place. “When men 
hear of your coming,” Archbishop Islip wrote to Edward, 
“everybody at once, for sheer fear. sets about hiding or 
eating or getting rid of their geese and chickens or other 
possessions that they may not utterly lose them through 
your arrival. The purveyors and servants of your court 
seize on men and horses in the midst of their field work. 

They seize on the very bullocks that are at plough or at. 
sowing, and force them to work for two or three days at 
a time without a penny of payment. It is no wonder that 
men make dole and murmur at your approach, for, as the 
truth is in God, I myself, whenever I hear a rumor of it, 

be [ at home or in chapter or in church or at study, nay, 

if | am saying mass, even I in my own person tremble in 

every limb.” But these irregular’ exactions were little 

beside the steady pressure of taxation. Even in the years 

of peace fifteenths and tenths, subsidies on wool and 

subsidies on leather, were demanded and obtained from 
Parliament; and with the outbreak of war the royal 

demands became heavier and more frequent. As failure 

followed failure the expenses of each campaign increased : 

an ineffectual attempt to relieve Rochelle cost nearly a 
million; the march of John of Gaunt through France 

utterly drained the royal treasury. Nor were these legal 

supplies all that the King drew from the nation. Hehad 
repudiated his pledge to abstain from arbitrary taxation 
of imports and exports. He sold monopolies to the mer- 
chants in exchange for increased customs. He wrested 
supplies from the clergy by arrangements with the bishops _ 
or the Pope. There were signs that Edward was longing 
to rid himself of the control of Parliament altogether. 
The power of the Houses seemed indeed as high as ever ; 
great statutes were passed. ‘Those of Provisors and 
Premunire settled the relations of England to the Roman 
Court. That of Treason in 1352 defined that crime and 
its penalties. That of the Staples in 1353 regulated the 
conditions of foreign trade and the privileges of the 
merchant gilds which conducted it. But side by side 


430 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


with these exertions of influence we notea series of steady 
encroachments by the Crown on the power of the Houses. 
If their petitions were granted, they were often altered 
in the royal ordinance which professed to embody them. 
A plan of demanding supplies for three years at once 
rendered the annual assembly of Parliament less necessary. 
Its very existence was threatened by the convocation in 
1352 and 1353 of occasional councils with but a single 
knight from every shire and a single burgess from a small 
number of the greater towns, which acted as Parliament 
and granted subsidies. 

What aided Edward above allin eluding or defying 
the constitutional restrictions on arbitrary taxation, as 
well as in these more insidious attempts to displace the 
Parliament, was the lessening of the check which the 
Baronage and the Church had till now supplied. The 
same causes which had long been reducing the number 
cf the greater lords who formed the upper house went 
steadily on. Under Edward the Second little more than 
seventy were commonly summoned to Parliament; little 
more than forty were summoned under Edward the Third, 
and of these the bulk were now bound to the Crown, 
partly by their employment on its service, partly by their 
interest in the continuance of the war. The heads of 
the Baronage too were members of the royal family. 
Edward had carried:out on a far wider scale than before 
the policy which had been more or less adhered to from 
the days of Henry the Third, that of gathering up in the © 
hands of the royal house all the greater heritages of the 
land. The Black Prince was married to Joan of Kent, 
the heiress of Edward the First’s younger son, Earl Ed- 
mund of Woodstock. His marriage with the heiress of 
the Earl of Ulster brought to the King’s second son, 
Lionel, Duke of Clarence, a great part of the posses- 
sions of the de Burghs. Later on the possessions of the 
house of Bohun passed by like matches to his youngest 
son, Thomas of Woodstock, and to his grandson Henry 
of Lancaster. But the greatest English heritage fell to 
Edward’s third living son, John of Gaunt as he was 
called from his birth at Ghent during his father’s Flem- 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 431 


ish campaign. Originally created Earl of Richmond, the 
death of his father-in-law, Henry of Lancaster, and of 
Henry’s eldest daughter, raised John in his wife’s right 
to the Dukedom of Lancaster and the Earldoms of 
Derby, Leicester, and Lincoln. But while the baronage 
were thus bound to the Crown, they drifted more and 
more into an hostility with the Church which in time 
disabled the clergy from acting as a check on it. What 
rent the ruling classes in twain was the growing pres- 
sure of the war. The nobles and knighthood of the 
country, already half ruined by the rise in the labor mar- 
ket and the attitude of the peasantry, were pressed 
harder than ever by the repeated subsidies which were 
called for by the continuance of the struggle. In the 
hour of their distress they cast their eyes greedily—as in 
the Norman and Angevin days—on the riches of the 
Church. Never had her wealth been greater. Out ofa 
population of some three millions the ecclesiastics num- 
bered between twenty and thirty thousand. Wild tales 
of their riches floated about the country. They were 
said to own in landed property alone more than a third 
of the soil, while their “ spiritualities ” in dues and offer- 
ings amounted to twice the King’s revenue. Exagger- 
ated as such statements were, the wealth of the Church 
was really great; but even more galling to the nobles 
was its influence in the royal councils. The feudal bar- 
onage, flushed with a new pride by its victories at Crecy 
and Poitiers, looked with envy and wrath at the throng 
of bishops around the council-board, and attributed to 
their love of peace the errors and sluggishness which had 
caused, as they held, the disasters of the war. To rob 
the Church of wealth and of power became the aim of a 
great baronial party. 

The efforts of the baronage indeed would have been 
fruitless had the spiritual power of the Church remained 
as of old. But the clergy were rent by their own dis- 
sensions. The higher prelates were busy with the cares 
of political office, and severed from the lower priesthood 
by the scandalous inequality between the revenues of 
the wealthier ecclesiastics and the “poor parson” of the 


432 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


country. <A bitter hatred divided the secular clergy — 
from the regular; and this strife went fiercely on in the 
Universities. Fitz-Ralf, the Chancellor of Oxford, at- 
tributed to the friars the decline which was already being 
felt in the number of academical students, and the Uni- 
versity checked by statute their practice of admitting 
mere children into their order. The clergy too at large 
shared in the discredit and unpopularity of .the Papacy. 
Though they suffered more than any other class from the 
exactions of Avignon, they were bound more and more 
to the Papal cause. The very statutes which would 
have protected them were practically set aside by the 
treacherous diplomacy of the Crown. At home and 
abroad the Roman see was too useful for the King to 
come to any actual breach with it. However much Ed- 
ward might echo the bold words of his Parliament, he 
shrank from an open contest which would have added 
the Papacy to his many foes, and which would at the 
same time have robbed him of his most effective means 
of wresting aids from the English clergy by private ar- 
rangement with the Roman court. Rome indeed was 
was brought to waive its alleged right of appointing for- 
eigners to English livings. But a compromise was ar- 
ranged between the Pope and the Crown in which both 
united in the spoliation and enslavement of the Church. 
The voice of chapters, of monks, of ecclesiastical patrons, 
went henceforth for nothing in the election of bishops or 
abbots or the nomination to livings in the gift of church- 
men. The Crown recommended those whom it chose to 
the Pope, and the Pope nominated them to see or cure 
of souls. The treasuries of both King and Pope profited 
by the arrangement; but we can hardly wonder that 
after a betrayal such as this the clergy placed little trust 
in statutes or royal protection, and bowed humbly be- 
fore the claims of Rome. 

But what weakened the clergy most was their sever- 
ance from the general sympathies of the nation, their 
selfishness, and the worldliness of their temper. Im- 
faense as their wealth was, they bore as little as they 
could of the common burdens of the realm. They were 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 433 


still resolute to assert their exemption from the common 
justice of the land, though the mild punishments of the 
bishops’ courts carried as little dismay as ever into the 
mass of disorderly clerks. But privileged as they thus 
held themselves against all interference from the lay 
world without them, they carried on a ceaseless interfer- 
ence with the affairs of this lay world through their con- 
trol over wills, contracts and divorces. No figure was 
better known or more hated than the summoner who en- 
forced tie jurisdiction and levied the dues of their courts. 
By their directly religious offices they penetrated into 
the very heart of the social life about them. But power- 
ful as they were, their moral authority was fast passing 
away. ‘The wealthier churchmen with their curled hair 
and hanging sleeves aped the costume of the knightly 
society from which they were drawn and to which they 
still really belonged. We see the general impression of 
their worldliness in Chaucer’s pictures of the hunting 
monk and the courtly prioress with her love-motto on 
her brooch. The older religious orders in fact had sunk 
into mere landowners, while the enthusiasm of the friars 
had in great part died away and left a crowd of impudent 
mendicants behind it. Wyclif could soon with general 
applause denounce them as sturdy beggars, and declare 
that “the man who gives alms to a begging friar is ipso 
facto excommunicate.” 

It was this weakness of the Baronage and the Church, 
and the consequent withdrawal of both as represented 
in the temporal and spiritual Estates of the Upper House 
from the active part which they had taken till now in 
checking the Crown, that brought the Lower House to 
the front. The Knight of the Shire was now finally 
joined with the Burgess of the Town to form the Third 
Estate of the realm: and this union of the trader and 
the country gentleman gave a vigor and weight to the 
action of the Commons which their House could never 
have acquired had it remained as elsewhere a mere 
gathering of burgesses. But it was only slowly and un- 
der the pressure of one necessity after another that the 
Commons took a growing part in public affairs. Their 

8 


434 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


primary business was with taxation, and here they stood 
firm against the evasions by which the King still managed 
to baffle their exclusive right of granting supplies by vol- 
untary agreements with the merchants of the Staple. 
Their steady pressure at last obtained in 1862 an enact- 
ment that no subsidy should henceforth be set upon wool 
without assent of Parliament, while Puryeyance was re- 
stricted by a provision that payments should be made for 
all things taken for the King’s use in ready money. A 
hardly less important advance was made by the change 
of Ordinances into Statutes. Till this time, even when 
a petition of the Houses was granted, the royal Council 
had reserved to itself the right of modifying its form in 
the Ordinance which professed to embody it. It was 
under color of this right that so many of the provisions 
madein Parliament had hitherto been evaded or set aside. 
But the Commons now met this abuse by a demand that 
on the royal assent being given their petitions should be 
turned without change into Statutes of the Realm and 
derive force of law from their entry on the Rolls of Par- 
liament. ‘The same practical sense was seen in their deal- 
ings with Edward’s attempt to introduce occasional 
smaller councils with parliamentary powers. Such an 
assembly in 1858 granted a subsidy on wool. The Par- 
liament which met in the following year might have 
challenged its proceedings as null and void, but the 
Commons more wisely contented themselves with a de- 
mand that the ordinances passed in the preceding as- 
sembly should receive the sanction of the Three Estates. 
A precedent for evil was thus turned into a precedent for 
good, and though irregular gatherings of a like.sort were 
for a while occasionally held they were soon seen to be 
fruitless and discontinued. But the Commons long 
shrank from meddling with purely administrative matters. 
When Edward in his anxiety to shift from himself the 
responsibility of the war referred to them in 1864 for 
advice on one of the numerous propositions of peace, they 
referred him to the lords of his Council. “ Most dreaded 
lord.” they replied, “as to this war and the equipment 
needful for it we are so ignorant and simple that we 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 435 


know not how nor have the power to devise. Wherefore 
we pray your Gtace to excuse us in this matter, and that 
it please you with the advice of the great and wise per- 
sons of your Council to ordain what seems best for you 
for the honor and profit of yourself and of your kingdom. 
And whatsoever shall be thus ordained by assent and 
agreement on the part of you and your Lords we readily 
assent to and will hold it firmly established.” 

But humble as was their tone the growing power of 
the Commons showed itself in significant changes. In | 
1363 the Chancellor opened Parliament with a speech in 
English, no doubt as a tongue intelligible to the members 
of the Lower House. From a petition in 13576 that 
knights of the shire may be chosen by common election of 
the better folk of the shire and not merely nominated by 
the sheriff without due election, as well as from an earlier 
demand that thesheriffs themselves should be disqualified 
from serving in Parliament during their term of office, we 
see that the Crown had already begun not only to feel the 
pressure of the Commons but to meet it by foisting royal 
nominees on the constituencies. Such an attempt at 
packing the House would hardly have been resorted to 
had it not already proved too strong for direct control. A 
further proof of its influence was seen in a prayer of the 
Parliament that lawyers practising in the King’s courts 
might no longer be eligible as knights of the shire. The 
petition marks the rise of a consciousness that the House 
was now no mere gathering of local representatives but a 
national assembly, and that a seat in it could no longer 
be confined to dwellers within the bounds of this county 
or that. But it showed also a pressure for seats, a 
passing away of the old dread of being returned as a 
representative and a new ambition to gain a place among 
the members of the Commons. Whether they would or 
no indeed the Commons were driven forward to a more 
direct interference with public affairs. From the memo- 
rable statute of 1822 their right to take equal part in all 
matters brought before Parliament had been incontestable, 
and their waiver of much of this right faded away before 
the stress of time. Their assent was needed to the great 


436 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


ecclesiastical statutes which regulated the relation of the 
see of Rome to the realm. They naturally took a chief 
part in the enactment and re-enactment of the Statute of | 
Laborers. The Statute of the Staple, with a ‘host of 
smaller commercial and economical measures, were of 
their origination. But it was not till an open breach 
took place between the baronage and the prelates that 
their full weight was felt. In the Parliament of 1371, 
on the resumption of the war, a noble taunted the 
Church as an owl protected by the feathers which other 
birds had contributed, and which they had aright to 
resume when a hawk’s approach threatened them. The 
worldly goods of the Church, the metaphor hinted, had 
been bestowed on it for the common weal, and could be 
taken from it on the coming of common danger. The 
threat was followed by a prayer that the chief offices of 
state, which had till now been held by the leading bishops, 
might be placed in lay hands. The prayer was at once 
eranted: William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, 
resigned the Chancellorship, another prelate the Treasury, 
to lay dependents of the great nobles; and the panic of 
the clergy was seen in large grants which were voted by 
both Convocations. 

At the moment of their triumph the assailants of the 
Church found a leader in John of Gaunt, The Duke of 
Lancaster now wielded the actual power of the Crown. 
Edward himself wassinking into dotage. Of his sons the 
Black Prince, who had never rallied from the hardships 
of his Spanish campaign, was fast drawing to the grave ; 
he had lost a second son by death in childhood; the 
third, Lionel of Clarence, had died in 1868. It was 
his fourth son, therefore, John of Gaunt, to whom the 
royal power mainly fell. By his marriage with the heiress 
of the house of Lancaster the Duke had acquired lands 
and wealth, but he had no taste for the policy of the 
Lancastrian house or for acting as leader of the barons 
in any constitutional resistance to the Crown. His pride, 
already quickened by the second match with Constance to _ 
which he owed hisshadowy kingship of Castille, drew him 
to the throne ; and the fortune which placed the royal 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 437 


power practically in his hands bound him only the more 
firmly to its cause. Men held that his ambition looked to 
the Crown itself, for the approaching death of Edward and 
the Prince of Wales left but a boy, Richard, the son of the 
Black Prince, a child of but a few years old, and a girl, 
the daughter of the Duke of Clarence, between John and 
the throne. But the Duke’s success fell short of his pride. 
In the campaign of 1373 he traversed France without 
finding a foe, and brought back nothing save a ruined 
army to English shores. The peremptory tone in which 
money was demanded for the cost of this fruitless march, 
while the petitions of the Parliament were set aside tillit 
was granted, roused the temper of the Commons. They 
requested—it is the first instance of such a practice—a 
conference with the lords, and while granting fresh 
subsidies prayed that the grant should be spent only on 
the war. The resentment of the government at this 
advance towards a control over the actual management 
of public affairs was seen in the calling of no Parliament 
through the next two years. But the years were dis- 
astrous both at home and abroad. The war went steadily 
against the English arms. The long negotiations with the 
Pope which went on at Bruges through 1375, and in which 
Wyclif took part as one of the royal commissioners, ended 
in a compromise by which Rome yielded nothing. The 
strife over the Statute of Laborers grew fiercer and 
fiercer, and a return of the plague heightened the public 
distress. Edward was now wholly swayed by Alice 
Perrers, and the Duke shared his power with the royal 
mistress. But if we gather its tenorfrom the complaints 
of the succeeding Parliament his administration was as 
weak as it wascorrupt. The new lay ministers lent them- 
selves to gigantic frauds. The chamberlain, Lord Latim er, 
bought up the royal debts and embezzled the public 
revenue. With Richard Lyons, a merchant through whom 
the King negotiated with the gild of the Staple, he reaped 
enormous profits by raising the price of imports and by 
lending to the Crown at usurious rates of interest.. When 
the empty treasury forced them to calla Parliament the min- 
isters tampered with the elections through the sheriffs. 


438 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


But the temper of the Parliament which met in 1376, 
and which gained from after times the name of the Good 
Parliament, shows that these precautions had utterly 
failed. Even their promise to pillage the Church had 
failed to win for the Duke and his party the good will 
of the lesser gentry or the wealthier burgesses who to- 
gether formed the Commons. Projects of wide constitu- 
tional and social change, of the humiliation and impover- 
ishment of an estate of the realm, were profoundly 
distasteful to men already struggling with a social revo- 
lution on their own estates and in their own workshops. 
But it was not merely its opposition to the projects of 
Lancaster and his party among the baronage which won 
for this assembly the name of the Good Parliament. Its 
action marked a new period in our parliamentary history, 
as it marked a new stage in the character of the national 
opposition in the misrule of the Crown. Hitherto the 
task of resistance had devolved on the baronage, and had 
been carried out through risings of its feudal tenantry. 
But the misgovernment was now that of the baronage or 
of a main part of the baronage itself in actual conjunc- 
tion with the Crown. Only in the power of the Com- 
mons lay any adequate means of peaceful redress. ‘The 
old reluctance of the Lower House to meddle with 
matters of State was roughly swept away therefore by 
the pressure of the time. The Black Prince, anxious to 
secure his child’s succession by the removal of John of 
Gaunt, the prelates with William of Wykeham at their 
head, resolute again to take their place in the royal 
councils and to check the projects of ecclesiastical spolia- 
tion put forward by their opponents, alike found in it a 
body to oppose to the Duke’s administration. Backed by 
powers such as these, the action of the Commons showed 
none of their old timidity or self-distrust. The presenta- 
tion of a hundred and sixty petitions of grievances pre- 
luded a bold attack on the royal Council. “ Trusting in 
God, and standing with its followers before the nobles, 
whereof the chief was John Duke of Lancaster, whose 
doings were ever contrary,” their speaker, Sir Peter de 
la Mare, denounced the mismanagement of the war, the 


THE PARLIAMENT, 1307—1461. 439 


oppressive taxation, and demanded an account of the 
expenditure. ‘ What do these base and ignoble knights 
attempt ?”’ cried John of Gaunt. ‘“ Do they think they 
be kings or princes of the land!” But the movement 
was too strong to be stayed. Even the Duke was silenced 
by the charges brought against the ministers. After a 
strict inquiry Latimer and Lyons were alike thrown into 
prison, Alice Perrers was banished, and several of the 
royal servants were driven from the Court. At this mo- 
ment the death of the Black Prince shook the power of 
the Parliament. But it only heightened its resolve to _ 
secure the succession. His son, Richard of Bordeaux, 
as he was called from the place of his birth, was now a 
child of but ten years old; and it was known that doubts 
were whispered on the legitimacy of his birth and claim. 
An early marriage of his mother, Joan of Kent, a grand- 
daughter of Edward the First, with the Earl of Salisbury, 
had been annulled; but the Lancastrian party used this 
first match to throw doubts on the validity of her sub- 
sequent union with the Black Prince and on the right of 
Richard to the throne. The dread of Lancaster’s ambi- 
tion is the first indication of the approach of what was 
from this time to grow into the great difficulty of the 
realm, the question of the succession to the Crown. 
From the death of Edward the Third to the death of 
Charles the First no English sovereign felt himself secure 
from rival claimants of his throne. As yet, however, the 
dread was a baseless one; the people were heartily with 
the Prince and his child. The Duke’s proposal that the 
succession shonld be settled in case of Richard’s death 
was rejected; and the boy himself was brought into 
Parliament and acknowledged as heir of the Crown. 

To secure their work the Commons ended by obtaining 
the addition of nine lords with William of Wykeham and 
two other prelates among them to the royal Council. 
But the Parliament was uo sooner dismissed than the 
Duke at once resumed his power. His anger at the blow 
which had been dealt at his projects was no doubt quick- 
ened by resentment at the sudden advance of the Lower 
House. From the Commons who shrank even from giving 


440 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


counsel on matters of state to the Commons who dealt 
with such matters as their special business, who investi- 
gated royal accounts, who impeached royal ministers, who 
dictated changes in the royal advisers, was an immense 
step. But it was a step which the Duke believed could 
be retraced. His haughty will flung aside all restraints 
of law. He dismissed the new lords and prelates from 
the Council. He called back Alice Perrers and the 
disgraced ministers. He declared the Good Parliament 
no parliament, and did not suffer its petitions to be en- 
rolled as statutes. He imprisoned Peter de la Mare, and 
confiscated the possessions of William of Wykeham. His 
attack on this prelate was an attack on the clergy at large, 
and the attack became significant when the Duke gave 
his open patronage to the denunciations of Church prop- 
erty which formed the favorite theme of John Wycelif. 
To Wyclif sucha prelate as Wykeham symbolized the 
evil which held down the Church. His administrative 
ability, his political energy, his wealth and the colleges at 
Winchester and at Oxford which it enabled him to raise 
before his death, were all equally hateful. It was this 
wealth, this intermeddling with worldly business, which 
the ascetic reformer looked upon as the curse that robbed 
prelates and churchmen of that spiritual authority which 
could alone meet the vice and suffering of the time. 
Whatever baser motives might spur Lancaster and his 
party, their projects of spohation must have seemed to 
Wyelif projects of enfranchisement forthe Church. Poor 
and powerless in worldly matters, he held that she would 
have the wealth and might of heaven at her command. 
Wyclif’s theory of Church and State had led him long 
since to contend that the property of the clergy might be 
seized and employed like other property for national 
purposes. Such a theory might have been left, as other 
daring theories of the schoolmen had been left, to the 
disputation of the schools. But the clergy were bitterly 
galled when the first among English teachers threw him- 
self hotly on the side of the party which threatened them 
with spoliation, and argued in favor of their voluntary 
abandonment of all Church property and of a return to 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. Att 


their original poverty. They were roused to action when 
Wyclif came forward as the theological bulwark of the 
Lancastrian party at a monfent when the clergy were 
freshly outraged by the overthrow of the bishops and the 
plunder of Wykeham. They forced the King to cancel 
the sentence of banishment from the precincts of the 
Court which had been directed against the Bishop of 
Winchester by refusing any grant of supply in Convoca- 
tion till William of Wykeham took his seat init. But 
in the prosecution of Wyclif they resolved to return blow | 
for blow. In February, 18377, he was summoned before 
Bishop Courtenay of London to answer for his heretical 
propositions concerning the wealth of the Church. 

The Duke of Lancester accepted the challenge as 
really given to himself, and stood by Wyclif’s side in the 
Consistory Court at St. Paul’s. But uo trial took place. 
Fierce words passed between the nobles and the prelate : 
the Duke himself was said to have threatened to drag 
Courtenay out of the church by the hair of his head ; at 
last the London populace, to whom John of Gaunt was 
hateful, burst in to their Bishop’s rescue, and Wyclif’s 
life was saved with difficulty by the aid of the soldiery. 
But his boldness only grew with the danger. A Papal 
bull which was procured by the bishops, “directing the 
University to condemn and arrest him, extorted from him 
a bold defiance. In a defence circulated widely through 
the kingdom and laid before Parliament, Wyclif broadly 
asserted that no man could be excommunicated by the 
Pope “unless he were first excommunicated by himself.” 
He denied the right of the Church to exact or defend 
temporal privileges by spiritual censures, declared that a 
Church might justly be deprived by the King or lay lords 
of its property for defect of duty, and defended the sub- 
jection of ecclesiastics to civil tribunals. It marks the 
temper of the time and the growing severance between 
the Church and the nation that, bold as the defiance was, 
it won the support of the peopleas ofthe Crown. When 
Wyclif appeared at the close of the year in Lambeth 
Chapel to answer the Archbishop’s summons a message 
from the Court forbade the primate to proceed and the 
Londoners broke in and dissolved the session. 


4492 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Meanwhile the Duke’s unscrupulous tampering with 
elections had packed the Parliament of 1377 with his 
adherents. The work of the Good Parliament was undone, 
and the Commons petitioned for the restoration of all who 
had been impeached by their predecessors. The needs 
of the treasury were met by a novel form of taxation. 
To the earlier land-tax, to the tax on personalty which 
dated from the Saladin Tithe, to the customs duties which 
had grown into importance in the last two reigns, was now 
added a tax Which reached every person in the realm, a poll- 
tax of agroatahead. In this tax were sown the seeds of 
future trouble, but when the Parliament broke up in 
March the Duke’s power seemed completely secured. 
Hardly three months later it was wholly undone. In 
June Edward the Third died in a dishonored old age, 
robbed on his deathbed even of his rings by the mistress 
to whom he clung, and the accession of his grandson, 
Richard the Second, changed the whole face of affairs. 
The Duke withdrew from court, and sought a reconcilia- 
tion with the party opposed to him. The men of the Good 
Parliament surrounded the new King, and a Parhament 
which assembled in October took vigorotsly up its work. 
Peter de la Mare was released from prison and replaced 
in the chair of the House of Commons. The action of 
the Lower House indeed was as trenchant and com- 
prehensive as that. of the Good Parliament itself. In 
petition after petition the Commons demanded the con- 
firmation of older rights and the removal of modern abuses. 
They complained of administrative wrongs such as the 
practice of purveyance, of abuses of justice, of the oppres- 
sions of officers of the exchequer and of the forest, of the ill 
state of the prisons, of the custom of “‘ maintenance ” by 
which lords extended their livery to shoals of disorderly 
persons and overawed the courts by means of them. Amid 
ecclesiastical abuses they noted the state of the Church 
courts, and the neglect of the laws of Provisors. They de- 
manded that the annual assembly of Parliament, which had 
now become customary, should be defined by law, and that 
bills once sanctioned by the Crownshould be forthwith 
turned into statutes without further amendment or change 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 443 


on the part of the royal Council. With even greater 
boldness they laid hands on the administration itself. 
They not only demanded that the evil counsellors of the 
last reign should be removed, and that the treasurer of 
the subsidy on wool should account for its expenditure 
to the lords, but that the royal Council should be named 
in Parliament, and chosen from members of either estate 
of the realm. Though a similar request for the nomina- 
tion of the officers of the royal household was refused, 
their main demand was granted. It was agreed that the 
great officers of state, the chancellor, treasurer, and bar- 
ons of exchequer should be named by the lords in Parlia- 
ment, and removed from their offices during the king’s 
“tender years”? only on the advice of the lords. The 
pressure of the war, which rendered the existing taxes 
insufficient, gave the House a fresh hold on the Crown. 
While granting a new subsidy in the form of a land and 
property tax, the Commons restricted its proceeds to the 
war, and assigned two of their members, William Wal- 
worth and John Philpot, as a standing committee to reg- 
ulate its expenditure. The successor of this Parliament 
in the following year demanded and obtained an account 
of the way in which the subsidy had been spent. 

The minority of the King, who was but eleven years 
old at his accession, the weakness of the royal council 
amidst the strife of the baronial factions, above all the 
disasters of the war without and the growing anarchy 
within the realm itself, alone made possible this start- 
ling assumption of the executive power by the Houses. 
The shame of defeat abroad was being added to the 
misery and discomfort at home. The French war ran its 
disastrous course. One English fleet was beaten by the 
Spaniards, a second sunk by astorm; and a campaign in 
the heart of France ended, like its predecessors, in disap- 
pointment and ruin. Meanwhile the strife between em- 
ployers and employed was kindling into civil war. The 
Parliament, drawn as it was wholly from the proprietary 
classes, struggled as fiercely for the mastery of the laborers 
as it struggled for the mastery of the Crown. The Good 
Parliament had been as strenuous in demanding the en- 


444 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


forcement of the Statute of Laborers as any of its predeces- 
sors. In spite of statutes, however, the market remained 
in the laborers’ hands. The comfort of the worker rose 
with his wages. Men who had “no land to live on but 
their hands disdained to live on penny ale or bacon, and 
called for fresh flesh or fish, fried or bake, and that hot and 
hotter for chilling for their maw.” But there were dark 
‘shades in this general prosperity of the labor class. 
There were seasons of the year during which employment 
for the floating mass of labor was hard to find. In the 
long interval between harvest-tide and harvest-tide work 
and food were alike scarce in every homestead of the 
time. Some lines of William Longland give us the pic- 
ture of a farm of the day. ‘I haveno penny pullets for 
to buy, nor neither geese nor pigs, but two green cheeses, 
a few curds and cream, and an oaten cake, and two 
loaves of beans and bran baken for my children. I have 
no salt bacon nor no cooked meat collops for to make, 
but I have parsley and leeks and many cabbage plants, 
and eke a cow and a calf, and a cart-mare to draw a-field 
my dung while the drought lasteth, and by this livelihood 
we must all live till Lammas-tide [August], and by that 
I hope to have harvest in my croft.” But it was not till 
Lammas-tide that high wages and the new corn bade 
“Hunger go to sleep,’ and during the long spring and 
summer the free laborer and the “ waster that will not 
work but wander about, that will eat no bread but the 
finest wheat, nor drink but of the best and brownest ale,” 
was a source of social and political danger. ‘ He grieveth 
him against God and grudgeth against Reason, and then 
curseth he the King and all his council after such law to 
allow laborers to grieve.” Such a smouldering mass of 
discontent as this needed but a spark to burst into flame: 
and the spark was found in the imposition of fresh taxa- 
tion. 

If John of Gaunt was fallen from his old power he 
was still the leading noble in the realm, and it is possible 
that dread of the encroachments of the last Parliament on 
the executive power drew after a time even the new ad- 
visers of the Crown closer to him. Whatever was the 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 445 


- cause, he again came to the front. But the supplies 
voted in the past year were wastedin his hands. A fresh 
_ expedition against France under the Duke himself ended 
in failure before the walls of St. Malo, while at home 
his brutal household was outraging public order by the 
murder of a knight who had incurred John’s anger in the 
- precincts of Westminster. So great was the resentment of 
the Londoners at this act that it became needful to sum- 
mon Parliament elsewhere than to the capital; and in 
1378 the Houses met at Gloucester. The Duke succeeded 
in bringing the lords to refuse those conferences with the 
Commons which had given unity to the action of the 
late Parliament, but he was foiled in an attack on the 
clerical privilege of sanctuary and in the threats which 
his party still directed against Church property, while 
the Commons forced the royal Council to lay before them 
the accounts of the last subsidy and to appoint a commis- 
sion to examine into the revenue of the Crown. Un- 
happily the financial policy of the preceding year was per- 
sisted in. The check before St. Malo had been some- 
what redeemed by treaties with Charles of Evreux and 
the Duke of Britanny, which secured to England the 
right of holding Cherbourg and Brest ; but the cost of 
these treaties only swelled the expenses of the war. 
The fresh supplies voted at Gloucester proved insufficient 
for their purpose, and a Parliament in the spring of 1379 
renewed the Poll-tax in a graduated form. But the pro- 
ceeds of the tax proved miserably inadequate, and wher 
fresh debts beset the Crown in 1380 a return was again 
made to the old system of subsidies. But these failed in 
their turn; and at the close of the year the Parliament 
again fell back on a severer Poll-tax. One of the at- 
tractions of the new mode of taxation seems to have been 
that the clergy, who adopted it for themselves, paid in 
this way a larger share of the burdens of the state; but 
the chief ground for its adoption lay, no doubt, in its 
bringing within the net of the tax-gatherer a class which 
had hitherto escaped him, men such as the free laborer, the 
village smith, the village tiler. But few courses could 
have been more dangerous. The poll-tax not only 


446 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


brought the pressure of the war home to every house- 
hold; it goaded into action precisely the class which 
was already seething with discontent. The strife be- 
tween labor and capital was. going on as fiercely as ever 
in country andin town. The landlords were claiming 
new services, or forcing men who looked on themselves 
as free to prove they were no villeins by law. The free ~ 
laborer was struggling against the attempt to exact work 
from him at low wages. The wandering workman was 
being seized and branded as a vagrant. The abbey 
towns were struggling for freedom against the abbeys. 
The craftsmen within boroughs were carrying on the same 
strife against employer and craft-gild. And all this mass 
of discontent was being heightened and organized by 
agencies with which the government could not cope. 
The poorer villeins and the free laborers had long since 
banded together in secret conspiracies which the wealthier 
villeins supported with money. The return of soldiers 
from the war threw over the land a host of broken men, 
skilled in arms, and ready to take part in any rising. 
The begging friars, wandering and gossiping from village 
to village and street to street, shared the passions of the 
class from which they sprang. Priests like Ball openly 
preached the doctrines of communism. And to these 
had been recently added a fresh agency which could 
hardly fail to stira new excitement. With the practical 
ability which marked his character Wyclif set on foot 
about this time a body of poor preachers to supply, as he 
held, the place of those wealthier clergy who had lost 
their hold on the land. The coarse sermons, bare feet, 
and russet dress of these “Simple Priests” moved the 
laughter of rector and canon, but they proved a rapid 
and effective means of diffusing Wyclif’s protests against 
the wealth and sluggishness of the clergy, and we can 
hardly doubt that in the general turmoil their denuncia- 
tion of ecclesiastical wealth passed often into more 
general denunciations of the proprietary classes. 

As the spring went by quaint rimes passed through 
the country, and served as a summons to revolt. “ John 
Ball,” ran one, “ greeteth you all, and doth for to under- 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 447 


stand he hath rung your bell. Now right and might, 
will and skill, God speed every dele.” ‘ Help truth,” 

ran another, “‘and truth shall help you! Now reigneth 
pride in price, and covetise is counted wise, and lechery 
withouten shame, and gluttony withouten blame. Envy 
reigneth with treason, and sloth is take in great season. 
God do bote, for now is tyme!” We recognize Ball’s 
hand in the yet more stirring missives of “Jack the 
Miller” and “ Jack the Carter.” ‘ Jack Miller asketh help 
to turn his mill aright. He hath grounden small, small :. 
the King’s Son of Heaven he shall pay for all. Look 

thy mill go aright with the four sailes, and the post 
stand with steadfastness. With right and with might, 

with skill and with will; let might help right, and skill go 

before will, and right before might, so goeth our mill 

aright.” “ Jack Carter,” ran the companion missive, ‘ prays 
you all that ye make a good end of that ye have begun, 

and do well, and aye better and better: for at the even 

men heareth the day.” “ Falseness and guile,” sang Jack 

Trewman, “ have reigned too long, and truth hath been 

set under a loc’, and falseness and guile reigneth in every 
stock. Noman may come truth to, but if he sing “si 

dedero. ‘True love is away that was so good, and clerks 

for wealth work them woe. God do bote, for now is 

time.” In the rudejingle of these lines began for England 

the literature of political controversy: they are the first 
predecessors of the pamphlets of Milton and of Burke. 

Rough as they are, they express clearly enough the 

mingled passions which met in the revolt of the peasants : 

their longing for a right rule, for plain and simple justice : 
«their scorn of the immorality of the nobles and the infamy 
of the court , their resentment at the perversion of the law 
to the cause of oppression. 

From the eastern and midland counties the restlessness 
spread to all England south of the Thames. But the 
crounds of discontent varied with every district. The 
actual outbreak began on the 5th of June at Dartford, 
when a tiler killed one of the collectors of the poll-tax in 
vengeance for a brutal outrage on his daughter. ‘The 
country at once rosein arms. Canterbury, where “the whole 


448 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


town was of their mind,” threw open its gates to the 
insurgents who plundered the Archbishop’s palace and 
dragged John Ball from his prison. A hundred thousand 
Kentishmen gathered round Walter Tyler of Essex and 
John Hales of Malling to march upon London. Their 
grievance was mainly a political one. Villeinage was 
unknown in Kent. As the peasants poured toward Black- 
heath indeed every lawyer who fell into their hands was 
put to death; ‘not till all these were killed would the 
land enjoy its old freedom again,” the Kentishmen shouted 
as they fired the houses of the stewards and flung the 
rolls of the manor courts into the flames. But this action 
can hardly have been due to anything more than sympathy 
with the rest of the realm, the sympathy which induced 
the same men, when pilgrims from the north brought news 
that John of Gaunt was setting free his bondmen, to send 
- to the Duke an offer to make him Lord and King of 
England. Nor was their grievance a religious one. 
Lollardry can have made little way among men whose 
grudge against the Archbishop of Canterbury sprang from 
his discouragement of pilgrimages. Their discontent was 
simply political, they demanded the suppression of the 
poll-tax and better government ; their aim was to slay the 
nobles and wealthier clergy, to take the King into their 
own hands, and pass laws which should seem good to the 
Commons of the realm. The whole population joined 
the Kentishmen as they marched along, while the nobles 
were paralyzed with fear. The young King—he was but. 
a boy of sixteen—addressed them from a boat on the 
river; but the refusal of his Council under the guidance of | 
Archbishop Sudbury to allow him to land kindled the 
peasants to fury, and with cries of “ Treason” the great 
mass rushed on London. On the 18th of June its gates 
were flung open by the poorer artizans within the city, 
and the stately palace of John of Gaunt at the Savoy, 
the new inn of the lawyers at the Temple, the houses of 
the foreign merchants, were soon in ablaze. But the in- 
surgents, as they proudly boasted, were “ seekers of truth 
and justice, not thieves or robbers,” and a plunderer found 
carrying off a silver vessel from the sack of the Savoy was 


THE PARLIAMENT, 1307—1461. 449 


flung with his spoil into the flames. Another body of 
insurgents encamped at the same time to the east of the 
city. In Essex and the eastern counties the popular 
discontent was more social than political. The demands 
of the peasants were that bondage should be abolished, 
that tolls and imposts on trade should be done away 
with, that “no acre of land which is held in bondage or 
villeinage be held at higher rate than fourpence a year,” 
in other words, for a money commutation of all villein ser- 
vices. ‘Their rising had been even earlier than that cf the 
Kentishmen. Before Whitsuntide an attempt to levy the 
poll-tax gathered crowds of peasants together, armed 
with clubs, rusty swords, and bows. The royal commis- 
sioners who were sent to repress the tumult were driven 
from: the field, and the Essex men marched upon London 
on one side of the river as the Kentishmen marched on the 
other. The evening of the thirteenth, the day on which 
Tyler entered the city, saw them encamped without its 
walls at Mile-end. At the same moment Highbury and 
the northern heights were occupied by the men of Hertford- 
shire and the villeins of St. Alban’s, where a strife between 
abbot and town had been going on since the days of 
Edward the Second. 

The royal Council with the young King had taken 
refuge in the Tower, and their aim seems to have been to 
divide the forces of the insurgents. On the morning of 
the fourteenth, therefore, Richard rode from the Tower 
to Mile-end to meet the Essex men. ‘Iam your King 
and Lord, good people,” the boy began with a fearless- 
ness which marked his bearing throughout the crisis, 
“what will you?” ‘ We will that you free us forever,” 
shouted the peasants, “us and our lands; and that we 
be never named nor held for serfs!” “I grant it,” re- 
plied Richard; and he bade them go home, pledging 
himself at once to issue charters of freedom and amnesty. 
A shout of joy welcomed the promise. Throughout the 
day more than thirty clerks were busied writing letters 
of pardon and emaucipation, and with these the mass of 
the Essex men and the men of Hertfordshire withdrew 
quietly to their homes. But while the King was suc- 

29 


450 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


cessful at Mile-end a terrible doom had fallen on the 
councillors he left behind him. Richard had hardly 
quitted the Tower when the Kentishmen who had spent 
the night within the city appeared at its gates.- The gen- 
eral terror was shown ludicrously enough when they 
burst in, and taking the panic-stricken knights of the 
royal household in rough horse-play by the beard prom- 
ised to be their equals and good comrades in the days to 
come. But the horse-play changed into dreadful earnest 
when they found that Richard had escaped their grasp, 
and the discovery of Archbishop Sudbury and other min- 
isters in the chapel changed their fury into a ery for 
blood. The Primate was dragged from his sanctuary 
and beheaded. The same vengeance was wreaked on 
the Treasurer and the Chief Commissioner for the levy 
of the hated poll-tax, the merchant Richard Lyons who 
had been impeached by the Good Parliament. Richard 
meanwhile had ridden round the northern wall of the 
city to the Wardrobe near Blackfriars, and from this new 
refuge he opened his negotiations with the Kentish in- 
surgents. Many of these dispersed at the news of the 
King’s pledge to the men of Essex, but a body of thirty 
thousand still surrounded Wat Tyler when Richard, on 
the morning of the fifteenth, encountered that leader by 
a mere chance at Smithfield. Hot words passed between 
his train and the peasant chieftain who advanced to con- 
fer with the King, and a threat from Tyler brought on a 
brief struggle, in which the Mayor of London, William 
Walworth, struck him with his dagger to the ground. 
“Kill! kill!” shouted the crowd, “they have slain our 
captain!” But Richard faced the Kentishmen with the 
same cool courage with which he faced the men of Essex. 
“ What need ye, my masters!” cried the boy-king as he 
rode boldly up to the front of the bowmen. ‘Iam your 
Captain and your King; Follow me!” The hopes of the 
peasants centred in the young sovereign ; one aim of their 
rising had been to free him from the evil counsellors 
who, as they believed, abused his youth; andat his word 
they followed him with a touching loyalty and trust till 
he entered the Tower. His mother welcomed him within 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1807—1461. 451 


its walls with tears of joy. “Rejoice and praise God,” 
Richard answered, “ for I have recovered to-day my her- 
itage which was lost and the realm of England!” But 
he was compelled to give the same pledge of freedom to 
the Kentishmen as at Mile-end, and it was only after re- 
ceiving his letters of pardon and emancipation that the 
yeomen dispersed to their homes. 

The revolt indeed was far from being atan end. As 
the news of the rising ran through the country the discoe- 
tent almost everywhere broke into flame. There were 
outbreaksin every shire south of the Thames as far west- 
ward as Devonshire. In the north tumults broke out at 
Beverley and Scarborough, and Yorkshire and Lancashire 
made ready to rise. The eastern counties were in one 
wild turmoil of revolt. At Cambridge the townsmen 
burned the charters of the University and attacked the 
colleges. A body of peasants occupied St. Alban’s. In 
Norfolk a Norwich artisan, called John the Litster or 
Dyer, took the title of King of the Commons, and march- 
ing through the country at the head of a mass of peasants 
compelled the nobles whom he captured to act as his 
meat-tasters and to serve him on their knees during his 
repast. The story of St. Edmundsbury shows us what 
was going on in Suffolk. Ever since the accession of 
Edward the Third the townsmen and the villeins of their 
lands around had been at war with the abbot and his 
monks. The old and more oppressive servitude had long 
passed away, but the later abbots had set themselves 
against he policy of concession and concilation which 
had brought about this advance towards freedom. The 
gates of the town were still in the abbot’s hands. He 
had succeeded in enforcing his claim to the wardship of 
all orphans born within his domain. From claims such as 
these the town could never feel itself safe so long as 
mysterious charters from Pope or King, interpreted cun- 
ningly by the wit of the new lawyer class, lay stored in 
the abbey archives. But the archives contained other 
and hardly less formidable documents than these. Un- 
troubled by the waste of war, the religious houses 
profited more than any other landowners by the general 


452 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH 2EOPLE. 


growth of wealth. They had become great proprietors, 
money lenders to their tenants, extortionate as the Jew 
whom they had banished from their land. There were few 
townsmen of St. Edmund’s who had not some bonds laid 
up in the abbey registry. In 1327 one band of debtors 
had a covenant lying there for the payment of five 
hundred marks and fifty casks of wine. Another com- 
pany of the wealthier burgesses were joint debtors on a 
bond for ten thousand pounds. The new spirit of com- 
mercial activity joined with the troubles of the time to 
throw the whole community into the abbot’s hands. 

We can hardlv wonder that riots, lawsuits, and royal 
commissions marked the relation of the town and abbey 
under the first two Edwards. Under the third came an 
open conflict. In 13827 the townsmen burst into the 
great house, drove the monks into the choir, and dragged 
them thence to the town prison. ‘The abbey itself was 
sacked; chalices, missals, chasubles, tunicles, altar fron- 
tals, the books of the library, the very vats and dishes of 
the kitchen, all disappeared. The monks estimated their 
losses at ten thousand pounds. But the townsmen aimed — 
at higher booty than this. The monks were brought back 
from prison to their own chapter-house, and the spoil of 
their registry, papal bulls and royal charters, decds and 
bonds and mortgages, were laid before the. Amidst the 
wild threats of the mob they were forced to execute a 
grant of perfect freedom and of agild to the town as well 
as of free release to their debtors. Then they were left mas- 
ters of the ruined house. But all control over town or 
land was gone. ‘Through spring and summer no rent or 
fine was paid. The bailiffs and other officers of the abbey 
did not dare to show their faces in the streets. News 
came at last that the abbot was in London, appealing for 
redress to the court, and the whole country was at once on 
fire. A crowd of rustics, maddened at the thought of re- 
vived claims of serfage, of interminable suits of law, 
poured into the streets of the town. From thirty-two of 
the neighboring villages the priests marched at the head 
of their flocks as on a new crusade. The wild mass of 
men, women, and children, twenty thousand in all, as men 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 458 


guessed, rushed again on the abbey, and for four Novem: 
ber days the work of destruction went on unhindered. 
When gate, stables, granaries, kitchen, infirmary, hostelry 
had gone up in flames, the multitude swept away to the 
granges and barns of the abbey farms. Their plunder 
shows what vast agricultural proprietors the monks had 
become. A thousand horses, a hundred and twenty 
plough-oxen, two hundred cows, three hundred bullocks, 
three hundred hogs, ten thousand sheep were driven off, 
and granges and barns burned to the ground. It was. 
judged afterwards that sixty thousand pounds would 
hardly cover the loss. 

Weak as was the government. of Mortimer and Isabella, 
the appeal of the abbot against this outrage was promptly 
heeded. A royal force quelled the riot, thirty carts full 
of prisoners were despatched to Norwich; twenty-four 
of the chief townsmen with thirty-two of the village 
priests were convicted as aiders and abettors of the 
attack on the abbey, and twenty were summarily hanged. 
Nearly two hundred persons remained under sentence of 
outlawry, and for five weary years their case dragged 
on in the King’s courts. At last matters ended ina 
ludicrous outrage. Irritated by repeated breaches of 
promise on the abbot’s part, the outlawed burgesses 
seized him as he lay in his manor of Chevington, robbed 
and bound him, and carried him off to London. There 
he was hurried from street to street lest his hiding-place 
should be detected till opportunity offered for shipping 
him off to Brabant. The Primate and the Pope levelled 
their excommunications against the abbot’s captors in 
vain, and though he was at last discovered and brought 
home it was probably with some pledge of the arrange- 
ment which followed in 1832. The enormous damages 
assessed by the royal justices were remitted, the out- 
lawry of the townsmen was reversed, the prisoners were 
released. On the other hand the deeds which had been 
stolen were again replaced in the archives of the abbey, 
and the charters which had been extorted from the 
monks were formally cancelled. 

The spirit of townsmen and villeins remained crushed 


454 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


by their failure, and throughout the reign of Edward the 
Third the oppression against which they had risen went 
on without a check. It was no longer the rough blow 
of sheer force; it was the more delicate but more piti- 
less tyranny of the law. At Richard’s accession Prior 
John of Cambridge in the vacancy of the abbot was in 
charge of the house. The Prior was a man skilled in all 
the arts of his day. In sweetness of voice, in knowledge 
of sacred song, his eulogists pronounced him superior to 
Orpheus, to Nero, and to one yet more illustrious in the 
Bury cloister though obscure to us, the Breton Belga- 
bred. John was “ industrious and subtle,” and subtlety 
and industry found their scope in suit after suit with 
the burgesses and farmers around him. ‘“ Faithfully he 
strove,” says the monastic chronicler ‘ with the villeins 
of Bury for the rights of his house.” The townsmen he 
owned specially as his “ adversaries,’ but it was the 
rustics who were to show what a hate he had won. On 
the fifteenth of June, the day of Wat Tyler’s fall, the 
howl of a great multitude round his manor house at Mil- 
denhall broke roughly on the chauntings of Prior John. 
He strove to fly, but he was betrayed by his own ser- 
vants, judged in rude mockery of the law by villein and 
bondsman, condemned and killed. The corpse lay naked 
in the open field while the mob poured unresisted into 
Bury. Bearing the prior’s head on a lance before them 
through the streets, the frenzied throng at last reached 
the gallows where the head of one of the royal judges, 
Sir John Cavendish, was already impaled; and pressing 
the cold lips together in mockery of their friendship set 
them side by side. Another head soon joined them. 
The abbey gates were burst open, and the cloister filled 
with a maddened crowd, howling for a new victim, John 
Lackenheath, the warder of the barony. Few knew him 
as he stood among the group of trembling monks, but he 
courted death with a contemptuous courage. “Iam the 
man you seek,” he said, stepping forward; and in a 
minute, with a mighty roar of “ Devil’s son! Monk! 
Traitor!” he was swept to the gallows, and his head 
hacked from his shoulders. Then the crowd rolled back 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 455 


again to the abbey gate, and summoned the monks be- 
fore them. They told them that now for a long time 
they had oppressed their fellows, the burgesses of Bury; 
wherefore they willed that in the sight of the Commons 
they should forthwith surrender their bonds and char- 
ters. The monks brought the parchments to the market- 
place; many which were demanded they swore they 
could not find. A compromise was at last patched up ; 
and it was agreed that the charters should be surren- 
dered till the future abbot should confirm the liberties of — 
the town. Then, unable to do more, the crowd ebbed 
away. 

A scene less violent, but even more picturesque, went 
on the same day at St. Alban’s. William Grindecobbe, 
the leader of its townsmen, returned with one of the 
charters of emancipation which Richard had granted 
after his interview at Mile-end to the men of Essex and 
Hertfordshire, and breaking into the abbey precincts at 
the head of the burghers, forced the abbot to deliver up 
the charters which bound the town in bondage to his 
house. Buta more striking proof of servitude than any 
charters could give remained in the mill-stones which 
after a long suit at law had been adjudged to the abbey 
and placed within its cloister as a triumphant witness 
that no townsman might grind corn within the domain 
of the abbey save at the abbot’s mill. Bursting into 
the cloister, the burghers now tore the mill-stones from 
the floor, and broke them into small pieces, “ like blessed 
bread in church,” which each might carry off to show 
something of the day when their freedom was won again. 
But it was hardly won when it was lost anew. The 
quiet withdrawal and dispession of the peasant armies 
with their charters of emancipation gave courage to the 
nobles. Their panic passed away. The warlike Bishop 
of Norwich fell lance in hand on Litster’s camp, and 
scattered the peasants of Norfolk at the first shock. 
Richard with an army of forty thousand men marched 
in triumph through Kent and Essex, and spread terror 
by the ruthlessness of his executions. At Waltham he 
was met by the display of his own recent charters and 


456 HISTORY-OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


a protest from the Essex men that “they were so far as 
freedom went the peers of their lords.” But they were 
to learn the worth of a king’s word. ‘“ Villeins you 
were,” answered Richard, “and villeins you are. In 
bondage you shall abide, and that not your old bondage, 
but a worse!” The stubborn resistance which he met 
showed that the temper of the people was not easily 
broken. ‘The villagers of Billericay threw themselves 
into the woods and fought two hard fights before they 
were reduced t> submission. It was only by threats of 
death that verdicts of guilty could be wrung from Essex 
jurors when the leaders of the revolt were brought be- 
fore them. Grindecobbe was offered his life if he would 
persuade his followers at St. Alban’s to restore the 
charters they had wrung from the monks. He turned 
bravely to his fellow-townsmen and bade them take no 
thought for his trouble. “If I die,” he said, * I shall 
die for the cause of the freedom we have won, counting 
myself happy to end my life by such a martyrdom. Do 
then to-day as you would have done had I been killed 
yesterday.” But repression went pitilessly on, and 
through the summer and the autumn seven thousand 
en are said to have perished on the gallows or the 
eld. 


CHAPTER IV. 
RICHARD THE SECOND. 
1881—1400. 


TERRIBLE as were the measures of repression which 
followed the Peasant Revolt, and violent as was the 
passion of reaction which raged among the proprietary 
classes at its close, the end of the rising was in fact 
secured. The words of Grindecobbe ere his death were 
a prophecy which time fulfilled. Cancel charters of 
manumission as the council might, serfage was henceforth 
a doomed and perishing thing. The dread of another out- 
break hung round the employer. ‘The attempts to bring 
back obsolete services quietly died away. The old pro- 
cess of enfranchisement went quietly on. During the 
century and a half which followed the Peasant Revolt 
villeinage died out so rapidly that it became a rare and 
antiquated thing. ‘The class of small freeholders sprang 
fast out of the wreck of it into numbers and importance. 
In twenty years more they were in fact recognized as 
the basis of our electoral system in every English county. 
The Labor Statutes proved as ineffective as of old in 
enchaining labor or reducing its price. A hundred 
years after the Black Death the wages of an English 
laborer was sufficient to purchase twice the amount of 
the necessaries of life which could have been obtained 
for the wages paid under Edward the Third. The in- 
cidental descriptions of the life of the working classes 
which we find in Piers Ploughman show that this increase 
of social comfort had been going on even during the 
troubled period which preceded the outbreak of the 
peasants, and it went on faster after the revolt was over. 
But inevitable as such a progress was, every step of it 

(457) 


* 


458 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 


was taken in the teeth of the wealthier classes. Their 
temper indeed at the close of the rising was that of men 
frenzied by panic and the taste of blood. They scouted 
all notion of concession. The stubborn will of the con- 
quered was met by as stubborn a will in their conquerors. 
The royal Council showed its sense of the danger ofa 
mere policy of resistance by submitting the question of 
enfranchisement to the Parliament which assembled in 
November, 1381, with words which suggested a compro- 
mise. ‘Ifyou desire to enfranchise and set at liberty 
the said serfs,” ran the royal message, ‘“* by your common 
assent, as the King has been informed that some of you 
desire, he will consent to your prayer.” But no thoughts 
of compromise influenced the landowners in their reply. 
The King’s grant and letters, the Parliament answered 
with perfect truth, were legally null and void: their 
serfs were their goods, and the King could not take 
their goods from them but by their own consent. “ And 
this consent,” they ended, “‘we have never given and 
never will give, were we all to die in one day.” Their 
temper indeed expressed itself in legislation which was 
a fit sequel to the Statutes of Laborers. They forbade 
the child of any tiller of the soil to be apprenticed in a 
town. They prayed the King to ordain “ that no bond- 
man nor bondwoman shall place their children at school, 
as has been done, so as to advance their childrenin the 
world by their going into the church.’ The new colleges 
which were being founded at the Universities at this 
moment closed their gates upon villeins. 

The panic which produced this frenzied reaction against 
all projects of social reform produced inevitably as frenzied 
« panic of reaction against all plans for religious reform. 
Wyclif had been supported by the Lancastrian party till 
the very eve of the Peasant Revolt. But with the rising 
his whole work seemed suddenly undone. The quarrel 
between the baronage and the Church on which his 
political action had as yet been grounded was hushed in 
the presence of acommon danger. His “ poor preachers ” 
were looked upon as missionaries of socialism. The fr — 
charged Wyclif with being a “sower of strife, v 


° 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 459 


serpentlike instigation had set the serf against his lord,’ 
and though he tossed back the charge with disdain he 
had to bear a suspicion which was justified by the conduct 
of some of his followers. John Ball. who had figured in 
the front rank of the revolt, was falsely named as one of 
his adherents, and was alleged to have denounced in his 
last hour the conspiracy of the “ Wyclifites.’” Wyclif’s 
most prominent scholar, Nicholas Herford, was said to 
have openly approved the brutal murder of Archbishop 
Sudbury. Whatever belief such charges might gain, it 
is certain that from this moment all plans for the reor- 
ganization of the Church were confounded in the general 
odium which attached to the projects of the peasant 
leaders, and that any hope of ecclesiastical reform at the 
hands of the baronage and the Parliament was at an end. 
But even if the Peasant Revolt had not deprived Wyclif 
of the support of the aristocratic party with whom he had 
hitherto co-operated, their alliance must have been dis- 
solved by the new theological position which he had 
already taken up. Some months before the outbreak of 
the insurrection he had by one memorable step passed 
from the position of a reformer of the discipline and po- 
litical relations of the Church to that of a protester against 
its cardinal beliefs. Ifthere was one doctrine upon which 
the supremacy of the Medieval Church rested, it was 
the doctrine of Transubstantiation. It was by his exclu- 
sive right to the performance of the miracle which was 
wrought in the mass that the lowliest priest was raised 
high above princes. With the formal denial of the doc- 
trine of Transubstantiation which Wyclif issued in the 
spring of 1381 began that great movement of religious 
revolt which ended more than a century after in the es- 
tablishment of religious freedom by severing the mass of 
the Teutonic peoples from the general body of the Catholic 
Church. The act was the bolder that he stood utterly 
alone. The University of Oxford, in which his influence 
had been hitherto all-powerful, at once condemned him. 
“shn of Gaunt enjoined him to be silent. Wyelif was 
Bufzg as Doctor of Divinity over some disputations 
Is of the Augustinian Canons when his aca- 


460 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


demical condemnation was publicly read, but though 
startled for the moment he at once challenged Chancellor 
or doctor to disprove the conclusions at which he had 
arrived. The prohibition of the Duke of Lancaster he 
met by an open avowal of his teaching, a confession which 
closes proudly with the quiet words, “I believe that in 
the end the truth will conquer.” 

For the moment his courage dispelled the panic around 
him. The University responded to his appeal, and by dis- 
placing his opponents from office tacitly adopted his cause. 
But Wyelif no longer looked for support to the learned 
or wealthier classes on whom he had hitherto relied. He 
appealed, and the appeal is memorable as the first of such 
a kind in our history, to England at large. With an 
amazing industry he issued tract after tract in the tongue 
of the people itself. The dry, syllogistic Latin, the ab- 
struse and involved argument which the great doctor 
had addressed to his academic hearers, were suddenly 
flung aside, and by a transition which marks the wonder- 
ful genius of the man, the schoolman was transformed 
into the pamphleteer. If Chaucer is the father of our 
later English poetry, Wyclif is the father of our later 
English prose. The rough, clear, homely English of his 
tracts, the speech of the ploughman and the trader of the 
day though colored with the picturesque phraseology of 
the Bible, is in its literary use as distinctly a creation of 
his own as the style in which he embodied it, the terse, 
vehement sentences, the stinging sarcasms, the hard an- 
titheses which roused the dullest mind like a whip. 
Once fairly freed from the trammels of unquestioning 
belief, Wychf’s mind worked fast in its career of skep- 
ticism. Pardons, indulgences, absolutions, pilgrimages 
to the shrines of the saints, worship of their images, wor- 
ship of the saints themselves, were successively denied. 
A formal appeal to the Bible as the one ground of faith, 
coupled with an assertion of the right of every instructed 
man to examine the Bible for himself, threatened the 
very groundwork of the older dogmatism with ruin. Nor 
were these daring denials confined to the small circle of 
scholars who still clung to him. The “Simple Priests ” 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 461 


were active in the diffusion of their master’s doctrines, 
and how rapid their progress musthave been we may see 
from the panic-struck exaggerations of their opponents. 
A few years later they complained that the followers of 
Wycht abounded everywhere and in all classes, among 
the baronage, in the cities, among the peasantry of the 
country-side, even in the monastic cell itself. ‘ Every 
second man one meets is a Lollard.” : 

“ Lollard,” a word which probably means “ idle bab- 
bler,’ was the nickname of scorn with which the ortho- 
dox Churchmen chose to insult their assailants. But 
this rapid increase changed their scorn into vigorous ac- 
tion. In 1882 Courtenay, who had now become Arch- 
bishop, summoned a council at Blackfriars and formally 
submitted twenty-four propositions drawn from Wyclifs 
works. An earthquake in the midst of the proceedings 
terrified every prelate but the resolute Primate; the ex- 
pulsion of ill humors from the earth, he said, was of good 
omen for the expulsion of ill humors from the Church ; 
and the condemnation was pronounced. Then the Arch- 
bishop turned fiercely upon Oxford as the fount and 
centre of the new heresies. In an English sermon at St. 
Frideswide’s Nicholas Herford had asserted the truth of 
Wyclifs doctrines, and Courtenay ordered the Chancellor 
to silence him and his adherents on pain of being himself 
treated as a heretic. The Chancellor fell back on the 
liberties of the University, and appointed as preacher 
another Wyclifite, Repyngdon, who did not hesitate to 
style the Lollards “ holy priests,” and to affirm that they 
were protected by John of Gaunt. Party spirit. mean- 
while ran high among the students. The bulk of them 
sided with the Lollard leaders, and a Carmelite, Peter 
Stokes, who had procured the Archbishop's letters, 
cowered panic-stricken in his chamber while the Chan- 
cellor, protected by an escort of a hundred townsmen, 
listened approvingly to Repyngdon’s defiance. ‘I dare 
go no further,’ wrote the poor Friar to the Archbishop, 
“for fear of death ;” but he mustered courage at last to 
descend into the schools where Repyngdon was now 
maintaining that the clerical order was “better when it 


462 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


was but nine years old than now that it has grown to a 
thousand years and more.” The appearance, however, of 
scholars in arms again drove Stokes to fly in despair to 
Lambeth, while a new heretic in open Congregation main- 
tained Wyclif’s denial of Transubstantiation. ‘“ There is 
no idolatry,” cried William James, “savein the Sacra- 
ment of the Altar.” ‘ You speak like a wise mau,’ re- 
plied the Chancellor, Robert Rygge. Courtenay, how- 
ever, was not the man to bear defiance tamely, and his 
summons to Lambeth wrested a submission from Rygge 
which was only accepted on his pledge to suppress the 
Lollardism of the University. ‘I dare not publish them, 
on fear of death,”’ exclaimed the Chancellor when Cour- 
tenay handed him his letters of condemnation. <‘ ‘Then is 
your University an open fautor of heretics,” retorted the 
Primate, “if it suffers not the Catholic truth to be pro- 
claimed within its bounds.” The royal Council supported 
the Archbishop’s injunction, but the publication of the 
decrees at once set Oxford on fire. The scholars threat- 
ened death against the friars, ‘ crying that they wished 
to destroy the University.” The masters suspended 
Henry Crump from teaching as a troubler of the public 
peace for calling the Lollards “ heretics.” The Crown, 
however, at last stepped in to Courtenay’s aid, and a 
royal writ ordered the instant banishment of all favorers 
of Wyclif with the seizure and destruction of all Lollard 
books on pain of forfeiture of the University’s privileges. 
The threat produced its effect. Herford and Repyngdon 
appealed in vain to John of Gaunt for protection ; the 
Duke himself denounced them as heretics against the 
Sacrament of the Altar, and after much evasion they 
were forced to make a formal submission. Within Ox- 
ford itself the suppression of Lollardism was complete, 
but with the death of religious freedom all trace of in- 
tellectual life suddenly disappears. The century which 
followed the triumph of Courtenay is the most barren in 
its annals, nor was the sleep of the University broken 
till the advent of the New Learning restored to it some 
of the life and liberty which the Primate had so roughly 
trodden out. 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 463 


Nothing marks more strongly the grandeur of Wyclif’s 
position as the last of the great schoolmen than the reluc- 
tance of so bold a man as Courtenay, even after his triumph 
over Oxford, to take extreme measures against the head 
of Lollardry. Wycelif, though summoned, had made no 
appearance before the “Council of the Earthquake.” 
* Pontius Pilate and Herod are made friends to-day,” 
was his bitter comment on the new union which proved 
to have sprung up between the prelates and the monastic 
orders who had so long been at variance with 2ach other; . 
“since they have made a heretic of Christ, it is an easy 
inference for them to count simple Christians heretics.” 
He seems indeed to have been sick at the moment, but 
the announcement of the final sentence roused him to life 
again. He petitioned the King and Parliament that he 
might be allowed freely to prove the doctrines he had put 
forth, and turning with characteristic energy to the attack 
of his assailants, he asked that all religious vows might 
be suppressed, that tithes might be diverted to the main- 
tenance of the poor and the clergy maintained by the free 
alms of their flocks, that the Statutes of Provisors and 
Premunire might be enforced against the Papacy, that 
Churchmen might be declared incapable of secular offices, 
and imprisonment for excommunication cease. Finally, 
in the teeth of the council’s condemnation, he demanded 
that the doctrine of the Eucharist which he advocated 
might be freely taught. If he appeared in the following 
year before the convocation at Oxford it was to perplex 
his opponents by a display of scholastic logic which per- 
mitted him to retire without any retractation of his sac- 
ramental heresy. For the time his opponents seemed 
satisfied with his expulsion from the University, but in 
his retirement at Lutterworth he was forging during these 
troubled years the great weapon which, wielded by other 
hands than his own, was to produce so terrible an effect 
on the triumphant hierarchy. An earlier translation of 
the Seriptures, in part of which he was aided by his © 
scholar Herford, was being revised and brought to the 
second form which is better known as ‘“* Wyclif’s Bible,” 
when death drew near. The appeal of the prelates to 


464. HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


Rome was answered at last by a Brief ordering him to 
appear at the Papal Court. His failing strength exhausted 
itself in a sarcastic reply which explained that his refusal 
to comply with the summons simply sprang from broken 
health. ‘I am-always glad,” ran the ironical answer, 
“to explain my faith to. any one, and above all to the 
Bishop of Rome; for I take it for granted that if it be 
orthodox he will confirm it, if it be erroneous he will 
correct it. I assume too that as chief Vicar of Christ 
upon earth the Bishop of Rome is of all mortal men most 
bound to the law of Christ’s Gospel, for among the dis- 
ciples of Christ a majority is not reckoned by simply 
counting heads in the fashion of this world, but according 
to the imitation of Christ on either side. Now Christ 
during His life upon earth was of all men the poorest, 
casting from him all worldly authority. I deduce from 
these premisses as a simple counsel of my own that the 
Pope should surrender all temporal authority to the civil 
power and advise his clergy to do the’same.” The bold- 
ness of his words sprang perhaps from a knowledge that 
his end was near. The terrible strain on energies en- 
feebled by age and study had at last brought its inevitable 
result, and a stroke of paralysis while Wyclif was hearing 
mass in his parish church of Lutterworth was followed 
on the next day by his death. 

The persecution of Courtenay deprived the religious 
reform of its more learned adherents and of the support 
of the Universities. Wyclif’s death robbed it of its head 
at a moment when little had been done save a work of 
destruction. From that moment Lollardism ceased to be 
in any sense an organized movement, and crumbled into 
a general spirit of revolt. All the religious and social 
discontent of the times floated instinctively to this new 
centre. The socialist dreains of the peasantry, the new 
and keener spirit of personal morality, the hatred of the 
friars, the jealousy of the great lords towards the prelacy, 
the fanaticism of the reforming zealot were blended to- 
_ gether in a common hostility to the Church anda common 
resolve to substitute personal religion for its dogmatic and 
ecclesiastical system. Butit was this want of organiza- 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 465 


~ tion, this looseness and fluidity of the new movement, that 
made it penetrate through every class of society. Women 
as well as men became the preachers of the new sect. 
Lollardry had its own schools, its own books ; its pamph- 
lets were passed everywhere from hand to hand; scurril- 
~ ous ballads which revived the old attacks of “ Golias”’ in 
the Angevin times upon the wealth and luxury of the 
clergy were sung at every corner. Nobles like the Earl 
of Salisbury and at a later time Sir John Oldcastle placed 
themselves openly at the head of the cause and threw 
open their gates as a refuge for its missionaries. London 
in its hatred of the clergy became fiercely Lollard, and 
defended a Lollard preacher who ventured to advocate 
the new doctrines from the pulpit of St. Paul’s. One of 
its mayors, John of Northampton, showed the influence 
of the new morality by the Puritan spirit in which he 
dealt with the morals of the city. Compelled to act, as 
he said, by the remissness of the clergy who connived for 
money at every kind of debauchery, he arrested the loose 
women, cut off their hair, and carted them through the 
streets as objects of public scorn. But the moral spirit 
of the new movement, though infinitely its grander side, 
was less dangerous to the Church than its open repudia- 
tion of the older doctrines and systems of Christendom. 
Out of the floating mass of opinion which bore the name 
of Lollardry one faith gradually evolved itself, a faith in 
the sole authority of the Bible as a source of religious 
truth. The translation of Wyclif did its work. Scripture, 
complains a canon of Leicester, “ became a vulgar thing, 
and more open to lay folk and women that knew how to 
read than it is wont to be to clerks themselves.” Conse- 
quences which Wyclif had perhaps shrunk from drawing 
were boldly drawn by his disciples. The Church was 
declared to have become apostate, its priesthood was 
denounced as no priesthood, its sacraments as idolatry. 
It was in vain that the clergy attempted to stifle the 
new movement by their old weapon of persecution. The 
jealousy entertained by the baronage and gentry of every 
pretension of the Church to secular power foiled its 
efforts to make persecution effective. At the moment of 


466 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the Peasant Revolt Courtenay procured the enactment 
of a statute which commissioned the sheriffs to seize all 
persons convicted before the bishops of preaching heresy. 
But the statute was repealed in the next session, and 
the Commons added to the bitterness of the blow by 
their protest that they considered it “ in nowise their in- 
terest to be more under the jurisdiction of the prelates or 
more bound by them than their ancestors had been in 
times past.” Heresy indeed was still a felony by the 
common law, and if as yet we meet with no instances of 
the punishment of heretics by the fire it was because the 
threat of such a death was commonly followed by the 
recantation of the Lollard. But the restriction of each 
bishop’s jurisdiction within the limits of his own diocese 
made it impossible to arrest the wandering preachers of 
the new doctrine, and the civil punishment—even if it 
had been sanctioned by public opinion—seems to have 
long fallen into desuetude. Experience proved to the 
prelates that few sheriffs would arrest on the mere war- 
rant of an ecclesiastical officer, and that no royal court 
would issue the writ “for the burning of a heretic” on a 
bishop’s requisition. But powerless as the efforts of the 
Church were for purposes of repression, they were 
effective in rousing the temper of the Lollards into a 
bitter fanaticism. The heretics delighted in outraging 
the religious sense of their day. One Lollard gentleman 
took home the sacramental wafer and lunched on it with 
wine and oysters. Another flung some images of the 
saints into his cellar. The Lollard preachers stirred up 
riots by the virulence of their preaching against the 
friars. But they directed even fiercer invectives against 
the wealth and secularity of the great Churchmen. In 
a formal petition which was laid before Parliament in 
1395 they mingled denunciations of the riches of the 
clergy with an open profession of disbelief in transub- 
stantiation, priesthood, pilgrimages, and image worship, 
and a demand, which illustrates the strange medley of 
opinions which jostled together in the new movement, 
that war might be declared unchristian and that trades 
such as those of the goldsmith or the armorer, which 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 467 


were contrary to apostolical poverty, might be banished 
from the realm. ‘They contended (and it is remarkable 
that a Parliament of the next reign adopted the state- 
ment) that from the superfluous revenues of the Church, 
if once they were applied to purposes of general utility, 
the King might maintain fifteen earls, fifteen hundred 
knights, and six thousand squires, besides endowing a 
hundred hospitals for the relief of the poor. 

The distress of the landowners, the general disorgan- 
ization of the country, in every part of which bands of 
marauders were openly defying the law, the panic of the 
Church and of society at large as the projects of the 
Lollards shaped themselves into more daring and revo- 
lutionary forms, added a fresh keenness to the national 
‘discontent at the languid and inefficient prosecution of 
the war. ‘The junction of the French and Spanish fleets 
had made them masters of the seas, and what fragments 
were left of Guienne lay at their mercy. The royal 
Council strove to detach the House of Luxemburg from 
the French alliance by winning for Richard the hand of 
Anne, a daughter of the late Emperor Charles the Fourth 
who had fled at Crecy, and sister of King Wenzel of 
Bohemia who was now King of the Romans. But the 
marriage remained without political result, save that the 
Lollard books which were sent into their native country 
by the Bohemian servants of the new queen stirred the 
preaching of John Huss and the Hussite wars. Nor was 
English policy more successful in Flanders. Under 
Philip van Arteveldt, the son of the leader of 1345, the 
Flemish towns again sought the friendship of England 
against France, but at the close of 1382 the towns were 
defeated and their leader slain in the great French 
victory of Rosbecque. An expedition to Flanders in the 
following year under the warlike Bishop of Norwich 
turned out a mere plunder-raid and ended in utter failure. 
A short truce only gave France the leisure to prepare a 
counter-blow by the despatch of a small but well-equip- 
ped force tnder John de Vienne to Scotland in 1886. 
Thirty thousand Scots joined in the advance of this force 
over the border: and though northern England rose witk 


468 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


a desperate effort and an English army penetrated as 
far as Edinburgh in the hope of bringing the foe to battle 
it was forced to fall back without an encounter. Mean- 
while France dealt a more terrible blow in the reduction 
of Ghent. The one remaining market for English com- 
merce was thus closed up, while the forces which should 
have been employed in saving Ghent and in the protec- 
tion of the English shores against the threat of invasion 
were squandered by John of Gaunt in a war which he 
was carrying on along the Spanish frontier in pursuit of 
the visionary crown which he claimed in his wife’s right. 
The enterprise showed that the Duke had now abandoned 
the hope of directing affairs at home and was seeking a 
new sphere of activity abroad. To drive him from the 


realm had been from the close of the Peasant Revolt the’ 


steady purpose of the councillors who now surrounded 
the young King, of his favorite Robert de Vere and his 
Chancellor Michael de la Pole, who was raised in 1385 
to the Earldom of Suffolk. The Duke’s friends were ex- 
pelled from office; John of Northampton, the head of his 
adherents among the Commons, was thrown into prison ; 
the Duke himself was charged with treason and threat- 
ened with arrest. In 1386 John of Gaunt abandoned the 
struggle and sailed for Spain. 

Richard himself took part in these measures against 
the Duke. He was now twenty, handsome and golden- 
haired, with a temper capable of great actions and sud- 
den bursts of energy, but indolent and unequal. The 
conception of kingship in which he had been reared 
made him regard the constitutional advance which had 
gone on during the war as an invasion of the rights of 
his Crown. He looked on the nomination of the royal 
Council and the great officers of state by the two Houses 
or the supervision of the royal expenditure by the Com- 
mons as infringements on the prerogative which only the 
pressure of the war and the weakness of a minority had 
forced the Crown to bow to. The judgment of his 
councillors was one with that of the King. Vere was 
no mere royal favorite; he was a great noble and of an- 
cicnt lineage. Michael de la Pole was a man of large 


_—- 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 469 


fortune and an old servant of the Crown; he had taken 
part in the war for thirty years, and had been admiral 
and captain of Calais. But neither were men to counsel 
the young King wisely in his effort to obtain independ- 
ence at once of Parliament and of the great nobles. 
His first aim had been to break the pressure of the royal 
house itself, and in his encounter with John of Gaunt 
he had proved successful. But the departure of the 
Duke of Lancaster only called to the front his brother 
and his son. ‘Thomas of Woodstock, the Duke of Glou- | 
cester, had inherited much of the lands and the influence 
of the old house of Bohun. Round Henry, Earl of 
Derby, the son of John of Gaunt by Blanche of Lan- 
easter, the old Lancastrian party of constitutional op- 
position was once more forming itself. The favor shown 
to the followers of Wyclif at the Court threw on the 
side of this new opposition the bulk of the bishops and 
Churchmen. Richard himself showed no sympathy with 
the Lollards, but the action of her Bohemian servants 
shows the tendencies of his Queen. Three members of 
the royal Council were patrons of the Lollards, and the 
Earl of Salisbury, a favorite with the King, was their 
avowed head. The Commons displayed no hostility to 
the Lollards nor any zeal for the Church; but the luke- 
warm prosecution of the war, the profuse expenditure 
of the Court, and above all the manifest will of the King 
to free himself from Parliamentary control, estranged 
the Lower House. Richard’s haughty words told their 
own tale. When the Parliament of 1885 called for an 
inquiry every year into the royal household, the King 
replied he would inquire when he pleased. When it 
prayed to know the names of the officers of state, he 
answered that he would change them at his will. 

The burden of such answers and of the policy they 
revealed fell on the royal councillors, and the departure 
of John of Gaunt forced the new opposition into vig- 
orous action. The Parliament of 1386 called for the re- 
moval of Suffolk. Richard replied that he would not 
for such a prayer dismiss a turnspit of his kitchen. ‘The 
Duke of Gloucester end Bishop Arundel of Ely were 


470 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


sent by the Houses as their envoys, and warned the King 
that should a ruler refuse to govern with the advice of 
his lords and by mad counsels work out his private pur- 
poses it is lawful to depose him. The threat secured 
Suffolk’s removal; he was impeached for corruption and 
maladministration, and condemned to forfeiture and im- 
prisonment. It was only by submitting to the nomina- 
tion of a Continual Council, with the Duke of Glouces- 
ter at its head, that Richard could obtain a grant of sub- 
sidies. But the Houses were no sooner broken up than 
Suffolk was released, and in 1887 the young King rode 
through the country calling on the sheriffs to raise men 
against the barons, and bidding them suffer no knight 
of the shire to be returned for the next Parliament “ save 
one whom the King and his Council chose.” The gen- 
eral ill-will foiled both his efforts: and he was forced to 
take refuge in an opinion of five of the judges that the 
Continual Council was unlawful, the sentence on Suf- 
folk erroneous, and that the Lords and Commons had 
no power to remove a King’s servant. Gloucester an- 
swered the challenge by taking up arms, and a general 
refusal to fight for the King forced Richard once more to 
yield. A terrible vengeance was taken on his supporters 
in the recent schemes. In the Parliament of 1888 Glou- 
cester, with the four Earls of Derby, Arundel, Warwick, 
and Nottingham appealed on a charge of high treason 
Suffolk and De Vere, the Archbishop of York, the Chief 
Justice Tresilian, and Sir Nicholas Bramber. The first 
two fled, Suffolk to France, De Vere after a skirmish 
at Radcot Bridge to Ireland; but the Archbishop was 
deprived of his see, Bramber beheaded, and Tresilian 
hanged. The five judges were banished, and Sir Simon 
Burley with three other members of the royal household 
sent to the block. 

At the prayer of the “ Wonderful Parliament,” as 
some called this assembly, or as others with more justice 
“The Merciless Parliament,” it was provided that all 
officers of state should henceforth be named in Parlia- 
ment or by the Continual Council. Gloucester remained 
at the head of the latter body, but his power lasted 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 471 


hardly a year. In May 1389 Richard found himself 
strong enough to break down the government by a word. 
Entering the Council he suddenly asked his uncle how 
old he was. ‘ Your highness,’ answered Gloucester, 
“is in your twenty-second year!” “Then I am old 
enough to manage my own affairs,” said Richard coolly ; 
“T have been longer under guardianship than any ward 
in my realm. I thank you for your past services, my 
lords, but I need them no more.” The resolution was 
welcomed by the whole country; and Richard justified — 
the country’s hopes by wielding his new power with 
singular wisdom and success. He refused to recall de 
Vere or the five judges. The intercession of John of 
Gaunt on his return from Spain brought about a full 
reconciliation with the Lords Appellant. <A truce was 
concluded with France, and its renewal year after year 
enabled the King to enlighten the burden of taxation. 
Richard announced his purpose to govern by advice of 
Parliament; he soon restored the Lords Appellant to his 
Council, and committed the chief offices of state to great 
Churehmen like Wykeham and Arundel. A series of 
statutes showed the activity of the Houses. <A Statute 
of Provisors which re-enacted those of Edward the Third 
was passed in 1390; the Statute of Premunire, which 
punished the obtaining of bulls or other instruments 
from Rome with forfeiture, in 13938. The lords were 
bridled anew by a Statute of Maintenance, which forbade 
their violently supporting other men’s causes in courts of 
justice or giving “livery ” to a host of retainers. The 
Statute of Uses in 1891, which rendered illegal the de- 
vices which had been invented to frustrate that of Mort- 
main, showed the same resolve to deal firmly with the 
Church. A reform of the staple and other mercantile 
enactments proved the King’s care for trade. Through- 
out the legislature of these eight years we see the same 
tone of coolness and moderation. Eager as he was to 
win the good-will of the Parliament and the Church, 
Richard refused to bow to the panic of the landowners 
or to second the persecution of the priesthood. The de- 
mands of the Parliament that education should be denied 


4AT2 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


to the sons of villeins was refused. Lollardry as a social 
danger was held firmly at bay, and in 1887 the King 
ordered Lollard books to be seized and brought before 
the Council. But the royal officers showed little zeal in 
aiding the bishops to seize or punish the heretical 
teachers. 

It was in the period of peace which was won for the 
country by the wisdom and decision of its young King 
that England listened to the voice of her first great 
singer. The work of Chaucer marks the final settlement 
of the English tongue. The close of the great movement 
towards national unity which had been going on ever 
since the Conquest was shown in the middle of the four- 
teenth century by the disuse, even amongst the nobler 
classes, of the French tongue. In spite of the efforts of 
the grammar schools and of the strength of fashion Eng- 
lish won its way throughout the reign of Edward the 
Third to its final triumph in that of his grandson. It 
was ordered to be used in courts of law in 1362 “ because 
the French tongue is much unknown,” and the following 
year it was employed by the Chancellor in opening Par- 
liament. Bishops began to preach in English, and the 
English tracts of Wyclif made it once more a literary 
tongue. We see the general advance in two passages 
from writers of Edward’s and Richard’s reigns. ‘* Chil- 
dren in school,’ says Higden, a writer of the first period, 
‘against the usage and manner of all other nations be 
compelled for to leave their own language and for to 
construe their lessons and their things in French, and so 
they have since the Normans first came into England. 
Also gentlemen children taught for to speak French 
from the time that they be rocked in their cradle, and — 
know how to speak and play with a child’s toy, and 
uplandish (or country) men will liken themselves to 
gentlemen, and strive with great busyness to speak 
French for to be more told of.’ “This manner,” adds 
John of Trevisa, Higden’s translator in Richard’s time, 
“was much used before the first murrain (the Black 
Death of 1849), and is since somewhat changed. For 
John Cornwal, a master of grammar, changed the lore in 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1807—1461. 473 


grammar school and construing of French into English; 
and Richard learned this manner of teaching of him, as 
other men did of Pencrych. So that now, the year of our 
Lord 1385, and of the second King Richard after the 
Conquest nine,in all the grammar schools of England 
children leaveth French, and construeth and learneth in 
English. Also gentlemen have now much left for to teach 
their children French.” 

This drift towards a general use of the national tongue 
told powerfully on literature. The influence of the 
French romances, everywhere tended to make French 
the one literary language at the opening of the fourteenth 
century, and in England this influence had been backed 
by the French tone of the court of Henry the Third and 
the three Edwards. But at the close of the reign of 
Edward the long French romances needed to be trans- 
lated even for knightly hearers. ‘“ Let clerks indite in 
Latin,” says the author of the ‘ Testament of Love,” 
“and let Frenchmen in their French also indite their 
quaint terms, for it is kindly to their mouths ; and let us 
show our fantasies in such wordes as we learned of our 
mother’s tongue.” But the new national life afforded 
nobler materials than ‘“ fantasies’ now for English liter- 
ature. With the completion of the work of national 
unity had come the completion of the work of national 
freedom. The vigor of English life showed itself in the 
wide extension of commerce, in the progress of the towns, 
and the upgrowth of a free yeomanry. It gave even 
nobler signs of its activity in the spirit of national in- 
dependence and moral earnestness which awoke at the 
call of Wyclif. New forces of thought and feeling which 
were destined to tell on every age of our later history 
broke their way through the crust of feudalism in the 
socialist revolt of the Lollards, and a sudden burst of 
military glory threw its glamour over the age of Crecy 
and Poitiers. It is this new gladness of a great people 
which utters itself in the verse of Geoffrey Chaucer. 
Chaucer was born about 1340, the son of-a London 
vintner who lived in Thames Street ; and it was in London 
that the bulk of his life was spent. His family, though 


474. HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


not noble, seems to have been of some importance, for 
from the opening of his career we find Chaucer in close 
connection with the Court. At sixteen he was made 
page to the wife of Lionel of Clarence; at nineteen he 
first bore arms in the campaign of 1359. But he was 
luckless enough to be made prisoner; and from the time 
of his release after the treaty of Bretigny he took no 
further share in the military enterprises of his time. He 
seems again to have returned to service about the Court, 
and it was now that his first poems made their appear- 
ance, the “‘Compleynte to Pity” in 13868, and in 1869 the 
‘Death of Blanch the Duchesse,” the wife of John of 
Gaunt who from this time at least may be looked upon 
as his patron. It may have been to John’s influence that 
he owed his employment in seven diplomatic missions 
which were probably connected with the financial straits 
of the Crown. Three of these, in 1372, 1374, and 1878, 
carried him to Italy. He visited Genoa and the brilliant 
court of the Visconti at Milan; at Florence, where the 
memory of Dante, the “great master” whom he com- 
memorates so reverently in his verse, was still living, he 
may have met Boccaccio; at Padua, like his own clerk 
of Oxenford, he possibly caught the story of Griseldis 
from the lips of Petrarca. 

It was these visits to Italy which gave us the Chaucer 
whom we know. From that hour his work stands out 
in vivid contrast with the poetic literature from the heart 
of which it sprang. The long French romances were the 
product of an age of wealth and ease, of indolent curios-— 
ity, of a fanciful and self-indulgent sentiment. Of the 
great passions which gave life to the Middle Ages, that 
of religious enthusiasm had degenerated into the conceits 
of Mariolatry, that of war into the extravagances of 
Chivalry. Love indeed remained; it was the one theme 
of troubadour and trouveur; butit was a love of refine- 
ment, of romantic follies, of scholastic discussions, of 
sensuous enjoyment—a plaything rather than a passion. 
Nature had to reflect the pleasant indolence of man ; the 
song of the minstrel moved through a perpetual May- 
time ; the grass was ever green; the music of the lark 


THE PARLIAMENT, 1307—1461. 475 


and the nightingale rang out from field and thicket. 
There was a gay avoidance of all that is serious, moral, 
or reflective in man’s life: life was too amusing to be 
serious, too piquant, too sentimental, too full of interest 
and gayety and chat. It was an age of talk; “ mirth is 
none,” says Chaucer’s host, * to ride on by the way dumb 
as a stone;” and the Trouveur aimed simply at being the 
most agreeable talker of his day. His romances, his 
rimes of Sir Tristram, his Romance of the Rose, are full 
of color and fantasy, endless in detail, but with a sort 
of gorgeous idleness about their very length, the minute- 
ness of their description of outer things, the vagueness 
of their touch when it passes to the subtler inner world. 

It was with this literature that Chaucer had till now 
been familiar, and it was this which he followed in his 
early work. But from the time of his visits to Milan 
and Genoa his sympathies drew him not to the dying 
verse of France but to the new and mighty upgrowth of 
poetry in Italy. Dante’s eagle looks at him from the 
sun. ‘ Fraunces Petrark, the laureat poete,” is to him 
one “whose rethorique sweete, enluymned al Itail of 
poetrie.” The Troilus” which he produced about 1382is 
an enlarged English version of Boccaccio’s “ Filostrato ;” 
the Knight’s Tale, whose first draft is of the same period, 
bears slight traces of his Teseide. It was indeed the 
** Decameron” which suggested the very form of the 
“Canterbury Tales,” the earliest of which, such as those of 
the Doctor, the Man of Law, the Clerk, the Prioress, the 
Franklin, and the Squire, may probably be referred like 
the Parliament of Foules and the House of Fame to this 
time of Chaucer’s life. But even while changing, as it 
were, the front of English poetry Chaucer preserves his 
own distinct personality. If he quizzes in the rime of 
Sir Thopaz the wearisome idleness of the French romance 
he retains all that was worth retaining of the French 
temper, its rapidity and agility of movement, its light- 
ness and brilliancy of touch, its airy mockery, its gayety 
and good humor, its critical coolness and self-control. 
The French wit quickens in him more than in any 
English writer the sturdy sense and shrewdness of our 


476 ’ HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


national disposition, corrects its extravagance, and re- 
lieves its somewhat ponderous morality. If on the other 
hand he echoes the joyous carelessness of the Italian tale, 
he tempers it with the English seriousness. As he follows — 
Boccaccio all his changes are on the side of purity; and 
when the Troilus of the Florentine ends with the old 
sneer at the changeableness of woman Chaucer bids us 
‘look Godward,” and dwells on the unchangeableness of 
Heaven. 

The genius of Chaucer, however, was neither French 
nor Italian, whatever element he might borrow from 
either literature, but English to the core; and from the 
year 1384 all trace of foreign influence dies away. 
Chaucer had now reached the climax of his poetic power. 
He was a busy, practical worker, Comptroller of the 
Customs in 1874, of the Petty Customs in 1882, a mem- 
ber of the Commons in the Parliament of 13886. The fall 
of the Duke of Lancaster from power may have deprived 
him of employment for a time, but from 1389 to 1391 
he was Clerk of the Royal Works, busy with repairs and 
building at Westminster, Windsor, and the Tower. His 
air indeed was that of a student rather than of a man of 
the world, A single portrait has preserved for us his 
forked beard, his dark-colored dress, the knife and pen- 
case at his girdle, and we may supplement this portrait 
by a few vivid touches of his own. The sly, elvish face 
the quick walk, the plump figure and portly waist were 
those of a genial and humorous man ; but men jested at 
his silence, his abstraction, his love of study. ‘ Thou 
lookest as thou wouldest find an hare,” laughs the host, 
‘and even on the ground I see thee stare.” He heard 
little of his neighbors’ talk when office work in Thames 
Street was over. “Thou goest home to thy own house 
anon, and also dumb as a stone thou sittest at another 
book till fully dazed is thy look, and livest thus as an 
heremite, although,’ he adds slyly, “ thy abstinence is 
lite,” or little. But of this seeming abstraction from the 
world about him there is not a trace in Chaucer’s verse. 
We see there how keen his observation was, how vivid 
and intense his sympathy with nature and the men 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. - “ATE 


among whom he moved. “ Farewell, my book,” he cried 
as spring came after winter and the lark’s song roused 
him at dawn to spend hours gazing alone on the daisy 
whose beauty he sang. The field and stream and flower 
- and bird, much as he loved them, were less to him than 
man. No poetry was ever more human than Chaucer's, 
none ever came more frankly and genially home to men 
than his “ Canterbury Tales. z 

It was the continuation and revision of this work 
which mainly occupied him during the years from 1384 
to 1890. Its best stories, those of the Miller, the Reeve, 
the Cook, the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Friar, 
the Nun, the Priest, and the Pardoner, are ascribed to 
this period, as well as the Prologue. The framework 
which Chaucer chose—that of a pilgrimage from London 
to Canterbury—not only enabled him to string these 
tales together, but lent itself admirably to the peculiar 
characteristics of his poetic temper, his dramatic ver- 
satility and the universality of his sympathy. His tales 
cover the whole field of medizeval poetry ; the legend of 
the priest, the knightly romance, the wonder-tale of the 
traveller, the broad humor of the fabliau, allegory and 
apologue, all are there. He finds a yet wider scope for 
his genius in the persons who tell these stories, the thirty 
pilgrims who start in the May morning from the Tabard 
in Southwark—thirty distinct figures, representatives of 
every class of English society “from the noble to the 
ploughman. Wesee the “ verray perfight gentil knight ” 
in cassock and coat of mail, with his curly-headed squire 
beside him, fresh as the May morning, and behind them 
the brown-faced yeoman in his coat and hood of green 
with a mighty bow in his hand. A group of ecclesiastics 
light up for us the medieval church—the brawny hunt- 
loving monk, whose bridle jingles as loud and clear as 
the chapel- bell—the wanton friar, first among the beggars 
and harpers of the country side—the poor parson, thread- 
bare, learned, and devout (“‘Christ’s lore and his apostles 
‘ twelve he taught, and first he followed it himself” )— 
the summoner with his fiery face—the pardoner with his 
wallet ‘“ bretfull of pardons, come from Rome all hot ”— 


478 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the lively prioress with her courtly French lisp, her soft 
little red mouth, and “Amor vincit omnia” graven on 
her brooch. Learning is there in the portly person of 
the doctor of physic, rich with the profits of pestilence— 
the busy serjeant-at-law, ‘that ever seemed busier than 
he was’—the hollow-cheeked clerk of Oxford with his 
love of books and short sharp sentences that disguise a 
latent tenderness which breaks out at last in the story 
of Griseldis. Around them crowd types of English 
industry; the merchant; the franklin in whose house 
‘it snowed of meat and drink;” the sailor fresh from 
frays in the channel; the buxom wife of Bath; the 
broad-shouldered miller; the haberdasher, carpenter, 
weaver, dyer, tapestry-maker, each in the livery of his 
craft; and last the honest ploughman who would dike 
and delve for the poor without hire. It is the first time 
in English poetry that we are brought face to face not 
with characters of allegories or reminiscences of the past, 
but with living and breathing men, men distinct in 
temper and sentiment as in face or costume or mode of 
speech; and with this distinctness of each maintained 
throughout the story by a thousand shades of expression. 
and action. It is the first time, too, that we meet with 
dramatic power which not only creates each character 
but combines it with its fellows, which not only adjusts 
each tale or jest to the temper of the person who utters 
it, but fuses all into a poetic unity. It is life in its 
largeness, its variety, its complexity, which surrounds us 
in the “Canterbury Tales.” In some of the stories 
indeed, which were composed no doubt at an earlier 
time, there is the tedium of the old romance or the 
pedantry of the schoolman; but taken as a whole the 
poem is the work not of a man of letters but of a man 
of action. Chaucer has received his training from war, 
courts, business, travel—a training not of books but of 
life. And it is life that he loves—the delicacy of its 
sentiment, the breadth of its farce, its laughter and its 
tears, the tenderness of its Griseldis or the Smollett-like 
adventures of the miller and the clerks. It is this large- 
ness of heart, this wide tolerance, which enables him te 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. Aw 


reflect man for us as none but Shakspeare has ever 
reflected him, and to do this with a pathos, a shrewd 
sense and kindly humor, a freshness and joyousness of 
feeling, that even Shakspeare has not surpassed. 

The last ten years of Chaucer’s life saw a few more tales 
added to the Pilgrimage and a few poems to his work; but 
his power was lessening, and in 1400 he rested from his 
labors in hislast home, a house in the garden of St Mary’s 
Chapel at Westminster. His body rests within the Abbey 
church. It was strange that such a voice should have 
awakened no echo in the singers that followed, but the first 
burst of English song died as suddenly in Chaucer as the 
hope and glory of his age. He died indeed at the moment 
of a revolution which was the prelude to years of national 
discord and national suffering. Whatever may have been 
the grounds of his action, the rule of Richard the Second 
after his assumption of power had shown his capacity for 
self-restraint. Parted by his own will from the counsellors 
of his youth, calling to his service the Lords Appellant, 
reconciled alike with the baronage and the Parliament, the 
young King promised to be among the noblest and wisest 
rulers that England had seen. But the violent and 
haughty temper which underlay this self-command showed 
itself from time to time. The Earl of Arundel and his 
brether the bishop stood in the front rank of the party 
which had coerced Richa-d in his early days ; their influ- 
ence was great in the new government. But a strife 
between the Earl and John of Gaunt revived the King’s 
resentment at the past action of this house; and at the 
funeral of Anne of Bohemia in 1394 a fancied slight 
roused Richard to a burst of passion. He struck the Earl 
so violently that the blow drew blood. But the quarrel 
was patched up, and the reconciliation was followed by 
the elevation of Bishop Arundel to the vacant Primacy 
in 1396. In the preceding year Richard had crossed to 
Ireland and in a short autumn campaign reduced its native 
chiefs again to submission. Fears of Lollard disturbances 
soon recalled him, but these died at the King’s presence, 
and Richard was able to devote himself to the negotiation 
of a marriage which was to be the turning point of his 


480 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


reign. His policy throughout the recent years had been 
a policy of peace. It was war which rendered the Crown 
helpless before the Parliament, and peace was needful if 
the work of constant progress was not tobe undone. But 
the short truces, renewed from time to time, which he had 
as yet secured were insufficient for this purpose, for so 
long as war might break out in the coming year the King’s 
hands were tied. ‘The impossibility of renouncing the 
claim to the French crown indeed made a formal peace 
impossible, but its ends might be secured by a lengthened 
truce, and it was with a view to this that Richard in 1396 
wedded Isabella, the daughter of Charles the Sixth of 
France. The bride was a mere child, but she brought 
with her a renewal of the truce for eight and-twenty- 
"ears. 

: The match was hardly concluded when theveil under 
which Richard had shrouded his real temper began to be 
' dropped. His craving for absolute power, such as he 
witnessed in the Court of France, was probably intensified 
from this moment by a mental disturbance which gathered 
strength as the months went on. As if to preclude any 
revival of the war Richard had surrendered Cherbourg to 
the King of Navarre and now gave back Brest to the Duke 
of Britanny. He was said to have pledged himself at his 
wedding to restore Calais to the King of France.# But 
once freed from all danger of such a struggle the whole 
character of hisrule seemed to change. His court became 
as crowded and profuse as his grandfather's. Money was 
recklessly borrowed and as recklessly squandered. The 
King’s pride became insane, and it was fed with dreams of 
winning the Imperial crown through the deposition of 
Wenzel of Bohemia. The councillors with whom he had 
acted since his resumption of authority saw themselves 
powerless. John of Gaunt indeed still retained influence 
over the King. It was the support of the Duke of Lan- 
caster after his return from his Spanish campaign which 
had enabled Richard to hold in check the Duke of 
Gloucester and the party that he led; and the anxiety 
of the young King to retain this support was seen in his 
grant of Aquitaine to his uncle, and in the legitimation 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. _ 481 


of the Beauforts, John’s children by a mistress, Catherine 
Swinford, whom he married after the death of his second 
wife. The friendship of the Duke brought with it the 
adhesion of one even more important, his son Henry, the 
Earl of Derby. As heir through his mother, Blanche of 
Lancaster, to the estates and influence of the Lancastrian 
house, Henry was the natural head of a constitutional 
opposition, and his weight was increased by a marriage 
with the heiress of the house of Bohun. He had taken a 
prominent part in the overthrow of Suffolk and De Vere, 
and on the King’s resumption of power he had prudently 
withdrawn from the realm on a vow of Crusade, had 
touched at Barbary, visited the Holy Sepulchre, and in 
1390 sailed for Dantzig and taken part in a campaign 
against the heathen Prussians with the Teutonic Knights. 
Since his return he had silently followed in his father’s 
track. But the counsels of John of Gaunt were hardly 
wiser than of old; Arundel had already denounced his 
influence as a hurtful one; and in the events which were 
now to hurry quickly on he seems to have gone hand in 
hand with the King. 

A new uneasiness was seen in the Parliament of 1397, 
and the Commons prayed for a redress of the profusion 
of the Court. Richard at once seized on the opportunity 
for a Struggle. He declared himself grieved that his 
subjects should “take on themselves any ordinance or 
governance of the person of the King or his hostel or of 
any persons of estate whom he might be pleased to have 
in hiscompany.” The Commons were at once overawed ; 
they owned that the cognizance of such matters belonged 
wholly to the King, and gave up to the Duke of Lancaster 
the name of the member, Sir Thomas Haxey, who had 
brought forward this article of their prayer. The lords 
pronounced him a traitor, and his life was only saved by 
the fact that he was a clergyman and by the interposition 
of Archbishop Arundel. The Earl of Arundel and the 
Duke of Gloucester at once withdrew from Court. They 
stood almost alone, for of the royal house the Dukes of 
Lancaster and York with their sons the Earls of Derby 
and Rutland were now with the King, and the old coad- 


482 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


jutor of Gloucester, the Earl of Nottingham, was in high 
favor with him. The Earl of Warwick alone joined them, 
and he was included in a charge of conspiracy which was 
followed by the arrest of the three, A fresh Parliament 
in September was packed with royal partizans, and Rich- 
ard moved holdly to his end. The pardons of the Lords 
Appellant were revoked. Archbishop Arundel was im- 
peached and banished from the realm, he was transferred 
by the Pope to the See of St. Andrew’s, and the Primacy 
given to Roger Walden. The Earl of Arundel, accused 
before the Peers under John of Gaunt as High Steward, 
was condemned and executed ina single day. Warwick, 
who owned the truth of the charge, was condemned to 
perpetual imprisonment. The Duke of Gloucester was 
saved from a trial by a sudden death in his prison at 
Calais. A new Parliament at Shrewsbury in the opening 
of 1398 completed the King’s work. In three days it 
declared null the proceedings of the Parliament of 1388, 
granted to the King a subsidy on wool and leather for 
his life, and delegated its authority toa standing committee 
of eighteen members from both Houses with power to 
continue their sittings even after the dissolution of the 
Parliament and to “ examine and determine all matters 
and subjects which had been moved in the presence of 
the King with all the dependencies thereof.” 

In a single year the whole color of Richard’s govern- 
ment had changed. He had revenged himself on the men 
who had once held him down, and his revenge was hardly 
taken before he disclosed a plan of absolute government. 
He had used the Parliament to strike down the Primate 
as well as the greatest nobles of the realm and to give 
him a revenue for life which enabled him to get rid of 
Parliament itself, for the Permanent Committee which it 
named were men devoted, as Richard held, to his cause. 
John of Gaunt was at its head, and the rest of its lords 
were those who had backed the King in his blow at 
Gloucester and the Arundels. Two however were ex- 
cluded. In the general distribution of rewards which 
followed Gloucester’s overthrow the Earl of Derby had 
been made Duke of Hereford, the Earl of Nottingham 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 483 


Duke of Norfolk. But at the close of 1597 the two 
Dukvs charged each other with treasonable talk as they 
rode between Brentford and London, and the Permanent 
Committee ordered the matter to be settled by a single 
combat. In September 1398 the Dukes entered the lists ; 
but Richard forbade the duel, sentenced the Duke of Nov- 
folk to banishment for life, and Henry of Lancaster to 
exile for six years. As Henry left London the streets 
were crowded with people weeping for his fate; some 
followed him even to the coast. But his withdrawal re- — 
moved the last check on Richard’s despotism. He forced 

from every tenant of the Crown an oath to recognize the 

acts of his Committee as valid, and to oppose any attempts 

to alter or revoke them. Forced loans, the sale of char- 

ters of pardon to Gloucester’s adherents, the outlawry 

of seven counties at once on the plea that. they had sup- 
ported his enemies and must purchase pardon, a reckless 

interference with the course of justice, roused into new 

life the old discontent. Even this might have been defied 

had not Richard set an able and unscrupulous leader at 

its head. Leave had been given to Henry of Lancaster 

to receive his father’s inheritance on the death of John 

o: Gaunt, in February 1399. But an ordinance of the 

Continual Committee annulled this permission and Rich- 

ard seized the Lincastrian estates. Archbishop Arundel 

at once saw the chance of dealing blow for blow. He 

hastened to Paris and pressed the Duke to return to Eng- 

land, telling him how all men there looked for it, “ espe- 

cially the Londoners, who loved him a hundred times 

more than they did the King.” For a while Henry re- 

mained buried in thought, js leaning on a window over- 

looking a garden;” but Arundel’s pressure at last pre- 

vailed, he made his way secretly to Britanny, and with 
fifteen knights set sail from Vannes. 

What had really decided him was the opportunity 
offered by Richard’s absence from the realm. From the 
opening of his reign the King’s attention had been con- 
stantly drawn to his dependent lordship of Ireland. More 
than two hundred years had passed away since the trou-. 
bles which followed the murder of Archbishop Thomas 


484 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


forced Henry the Second to leave his work of conquest 
unfinished, and the opportunity for a complete reduction 
of the island which had been lost then had never returned. 
When Henry quitted Ireland indeed Leinster was wholly 
in English hands, Connaught bowed to a nominal ac- 
knowledgment of the English overlordship, and for a 
while the work of conquest seemed to go steadily on. 
John de Courcy penetrated into Ulster and established 
himself at Down-Patrick ; and Henry planned the estab- 
lishment of his youngest son, John, as Lord of Ireland. 
But the levity of the young prince, who mocked the rude 
dresses of the native chieftains and plucked them in insult 
by the beard, soon forced his father to recall him; and 
in the continental struggle which soon opened on the 
Angevin kings as in the constitutional struggle within 
England itself which followed it all serious purpose of 
completing the conquest of Ireland was forgotten. Noth- 
ing indeed but the feuds and weakness of the Irish tribes 
enabled the adventurers to hold the districts of Drogheda, 
Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, and Cork, which formed 
what was thenceforth known as “the English Pale.” 
In all the history of Ireland no event has proved more 
disastrous than this half-finished conquest. Had the 
lrish driven their invaders into the sea, or the English 
succeeded in the complete reduction of the island, the 
misery of its after ages might have been avoided. A 
struggle such as that in which Scotland drove out its 
conquerors might have produced a spirit of patriotism 
and national unity which would have formed a people out 
ofthe mass of warring clans. A conquest such as that in 
which the Normans made England their own would have 
spread at any rate the law, the order, the civilization of 
the conquering country over the length and breadth 
of the conquered. Unhappily Ireland, while powerless to 
effect its entire deliverance, was strong enough to hold 
its assailants partially at bay. ‘TLe country was broken 
into two halves whose conflict has never ceased. So far 
from either giving elements of civilization or good govern- 
. ment to the other, conqueror and conquered reaped only 
degradation from the ceaseless conflict. The native 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1807—1461. 485 


tribes lost whatever tendency to union or social progress . 
had survived the invasion of the Danes. Their barbarism 
was intensified by their hatred of the more civilized in- 
truders. But these intruders themselves, penned within 
the narrow limits of the Pale, brutalized by a merciless 
conflict, cut off from contact with the refining influences 
of a larger world, sank rapidly to the level of the barbar- 
ism about them: and the lawlessness, the ferocity, the 
narrowness of feudalism broke out unchecked in this 
horde of adventurers who held the land by their sword. 
From the first the story of the English Pale was a 
story of degradation and anarchy. It needed the stern 
vengeance of John, whose army stormed its strongholds 
and drove its leading barons into exile, to preserve even 
their fealty to the English Crown. John divided the 
Pale into counties and ordered the observance of the 
English law; but the departure of his army was the 
signal for a return of the disorder he had trampled under 
foot. Between Englishmen and Irishmen went on a 
ceaseless and pitiless war. Every Irishman without the 
Pale was counted by the English settlers an enemy and 
a robber whose murder found no cognizance or punish~ 
ment at the hands of the law. Half the subsistence of 
the English barons was drawn from forays across the 
border, and these forays were avenged by incursions of 
native marauders which carried havoc at times to the 
very walls of Dublin. Within the Pale itself the misery 
was hardly less. The English settlers were harried and 
oppressed by their own baronage as much as by the Irish 
marauders, while the feuds of the English lords wasted 
their strength and prevented any effective combination 
either for common conquest or common defence. So 
utter seemed their weakness that Robert Bruce saw in it 
an opportunity for a counter-blow at his English assail- 
ants, and his victory at Bannockburn was followed up 
by the despatch of a Scotch force to Ireland with his 
brother Edward at its head. A general rising of the 
Irish welcomed this deliverer; but the danger drove the 
barons of the Pale to a momentary union, and in 1316 
their valor was proved on the bloody field of Athenree 


486 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


. by the slaughter of eleven thousand of their foes and the 
almost complete annihilation of the sept of the O’Con- 
nors. But with victory returned the old anarchy and 
degradation. The barons of the Pale sank more and 
more into Irish chieftains. The Fitz-Maurices, who be- 
came Earls of Desmond and whose vast territory in 
Munster was erected into a County Palatine, adopted the 
dress and manners of the natives around them. The rapid 
growth of this evil was seen in the ruthless provisions by 
which Edward the Third strove to check it in his Statute 
of Kilkenny. The Statute forbade the adoption of the 
Trish language or name or dress by any man of English 
blood: it enforced within the Pale the exclusive use of 
English law, and made the use of the native or Brehon 
law, which was gaining ground, an act of treason; it made 
treasonable any marriage of the Englishry with persons 
of Irish race, or any adoption of English children by 
Irish foster-fathers. 

But stern as they were these provisions proved fruit- 
less to check the fusion of the two races, while the grow- 
ing independence of the Lords of the Pale threw off all 
but the semblance of obedience to the English govern- 
ment. It was this which stirred Richard to a serious 
effort for the conquest and organization of the island. 
In 1386 he granted the “entire dominion” of Ireland with 
the title of its Duke to Robert de Vere on condition of 
his carrying out its utter reduction. But the troubles of 
the reign soon recalled De Vere, and it was not till the 
truce with France had freed his hands that the King 
again took up his projects of conquest. In 1394 he 
landed with an army at Waterford, and received the 
general submission of the native chieftains. But the 
Lords of the Pale held sullenly aloof; and Richard had 
no sooner quitted the island than the Irish in turn refused 
to carry out their promise of quitting Leinster, and en- 
gaged in a fresh contest with the Earl of March, whom 
the King had proclaimed as his heir and left behind him 
as his leutenant in Ireland. In the summer of 1398 
March was beaten and slain in battle; and Richard re- 
solved to avenge his cousin’s death and complete the 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. A487 


work he had begun by a fresh invasion. He felt no ap- 
prehension of danger. At home his triumph seemed 
complete. The death of Norfolk, the exile of Henry of 
uancaster, left the baronage without heads for any rising. 
"2 ensured, as he believed, the loyalty of the great houses 
b 7 she hostages of their blood whom he carried with him, 
at whose head was Henry of Lancaster’s son, the future 
Henry the Fifth. The refusal of the Percies, the Earl of 
Northumberland and his son Henry Percy or Hotspur, to 
obey his summons might have warned him that danger 
was brewing in the north. Richard, however, took little 
heed. He banished the Percies, who withdrew into Scot- 
land; and sailed for Ireland at the end of May, leaving 
his uncle the Duke of York regent in his stead. 

The opening of his campaign was indecisive, and it 
was not till fresh reinforcements arrived at Dublin that 
the King could prepare for a march into the heart of the 
island. But while he planned the conquest of Ireland 
the news came that England was lost. Little more than 
a month had passed after his departure when Henry of 
Lancaster entered the Humber and landed at Ravenspur. 
He came, he said, to claim his heritage ; and three of his 
Yorkshire castles at once threw open their gates. The 
two great houses of the north joined him at once. Ralph 
Neville, the Earl of Westmoreland, had married his half- 
sister ; the Percies came from their exile over the Scottish 
border. As he pushed quickly to the south all resistance 
broke down. ‘The army which the Regent gathered re- 
fused to do hurt to the Duke; London called him to her 
gates; and the royal Council could only march hastily 
on Bristol in the hope of securing that port for the King’s 
return. But the town at once yielded to Henry’s sum- 
mons, the Regent submitted to him, and with an army 
which grew at every step the Duke marched upon Che- 
shire, where Richard’s adherents were gathering in arms 
to meet the King. Contrary winds had for a while kept 
Richard ignorant of his cousin’s progress, and even when 
the news reached him he was in a web of treachery. 
The Duke of Albemarle, the son of the Regent Duke of 
York, was beside him, and at his persuasion the King 


A488 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


abandoned his first purpose of returning at once, and 
sent the Earl of Salisbury to Conway while he himself. 
waited to gather his army and fleet. The six days he 
proposed to gather them in became sixteen, and the delay 
proved fatal to his cause. As no news came of Richard 
the Welshmen who flocked to Salisbury’s camp dispersed 
on Henry’s advance to Chester. Henry was in fact 
master of the realm at the opening of August, when 
Richard at last sailed from Waterford and landed at Mil- 
ford Haven. 

Every road was blocked, and the news that all was 
lost told on the thirty thousand men he brought with 
him. Ina single day but six thousand remained, and 
even these dispersed when it was found that the King 
had ridden off disguised as a friar to join the force which 
he believed to be awaiting him in North Wales with 
Salisbury at its head. He reached Caernarvon only to 
find this force already disbanded, and throwing himself 
into the castle despatched his kinsmen, the Dukes of 
Exeter and Surrey, to Chester to negotiate with Henry 
of Lancaster. But they were detained there while the 
Earl of Northumberland pushed forward with a picked 
body of men, and securing the castles of the coast at 
last sought an interview with Richard at Conway. The 
King’s confidence was still unbroken. He threatened to 
raise a force of Welshmen and to put Lancaster to death. 
Deserted as he was indeed, a King was in himself a power, 
and only the treacherous pledges of the Earl induced 
him to set aside his plans for a reconciliation to be 
brought about in Parliament and to move from Conway 
on the promise of a conference with Henry at Flint. But 
he had no sooner reached the town than he found him- 
self surrounded by Lancaster’s forces. “ I am betrayed,” 
he cried, as the view of his enemies burst on him from 
the hill; “there are pennons and banners in the valley.” 
But it was too late for retreat. Richard was seized and 
brought before his cousin. ‘I am come before my time,” 
said Lancaster, “ but I will show you the reason. Your 
people, my lord, complain that for the space of twenty 
years you have ruled them harshly: however, if it please 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 489 


God, I will help you torule them better.” “ Fair cousin,” 
replied the King, “since it pleases you, it pleases me 
well.” Then, breaking in private into passionate regrets 
that he had ever spared his cousin’s life, he suffered him- 
self to be carried a prisoner along the road to London. 


CHAPTER V. 
THE HOUSE OF LANCASTER. 
1899—1422. 


ONCE safe in the Tower, it was easy to wrest from 
Richard a resignation of his crown ; and this resignation 
was solemnly accepted by the Parliament which met at 
the close of September 1399. But the resignation was 
confirmed by a solemn Act of Deposition. ‘The corona- 
tion oath was read, and along impeachment which stated 
the breach of the promises made in it was followed by a 
solemn vote of both Houses which removed Richard from 
the state and authority of King. According to the strict 
‘rules of hereditary descent as construed by the feudal 
lawyers by an assumed analogy with the rules which 
governed descent of ordinary estates, the crown would 
now have passed to a house which had at an earlier 
period played a leading part in the revolutions of the 
Edwards. The great-grandson of the Mortimer who 
brought about the deposition of Edward the Second had 
married the daughter and heiress of Lionel of Clarence, 
the third son of Edward the Third. The childlessness 
of Richard and the death of Edward’s second son without 
issue placed Edmund Mortimer, the son of the Earl who 
had fallen in Ireland, first among the claimants of the 
crown; but he was now a child of six years old, the 
strict rule of hereditary descent had never received any 
formal recognition in the case of the Crown, and prece- 
dent suggested a right of Parliament to choose in such a 
case a successor among any other members of the Royal 
House. Only one such successor was in fact possible. 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 491 


Rising from his seat and crossing himself, Henry of Lan- 
easter solemnly challenged the crown, “as that I am 
descended by right line of blood coming from the good 
lord King Henry the Third, and through that right that 
God of his grace hath sent me with help of my kin and 
of my friends to recover it: the which realm was in point 
to be undone by default of goverance and undoing of 
good laws.” Whatever defects such a claim might pre- 
sent were more than covered by the solemn recognition 
of Parliament. The two Archbishops, taking the new 
sovereign by the hand, seated him upon the throne, and 
Henry in emphatic words ratified the compact between 
himself and his people. “Sirs,” he said to the prelates, 
lords, knights, and burgesses gathered round him, “I 
thank God and you, spiritual and temporal, and all 
estates of the land; and do you to wit it is not my will 
that any man think that by way of conquest I would dis- 
inherit any of his heritage, franchises, or other rights 
that he ought to have, nor put him out of the good that 
he has and has had by the good laws and customs of the 
realm, except those persons that have been against the 
good purpose and the common profit of the realm.” 

The deposition of a king, the setting aside of one 
claimant and the elevation of another to the throne, 
marked the triumph of the English Parliament over the 
monarchy. The struggle of the Edwards against its grad- 
ual advance had culminated in the bold effort of Richard 
the Second to supersede it by a commission dependent 
on the Crown. But the House of Lancaster was pre- 
cluded by its very position from any renewal of the 
struggle. It was not merely that the exhaustion of the 
treasury by the war and revolt which followed Henry’s 
accession left him even more than the kings who had 
gone before in the hands of the Estates; it was that his 
very right to the Crown lay in an acknowledgment of 
their highest pretensions. He had been raised to the 
throne by a Parliamentary revolution. His claim to 
obedience had throughout to rest on a Parliamentary 
title. During no period of our early history, therefore, 
were the powers of the two Houses so frankly recognized. 


492 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


The tone of Henry the Fourth till the very close of his 
reign is that of humble compliance in all but ecclesiasti- 
cal matters with the prayers of the Parliament, and even 
his imperious successor shrank almost with timidity from 
any conflict with it. But the Crown had been bought 
by pledges less noble than this. Arundel was not only 
the representative of constitutional rule; he was also 
the representative of religious persecution. No prelate 
had been so bitter a foe of the Lollards, and the support 
which the Church had given to the recent revolution 
had no doubt sprung from its behef that a sovereign 
whom-Arundel placed on the throne would deal pitilessly 
with the growing heresy. The expectations of the clergy 
were soon realized. In the first Convocation of his reign 
Henry declared himself the protector of the Church and 
ordered the prelates to take measures for the suppression 
of heresy and of the wandering preachers. His declara- 
tion was but a prelude to the Statute of Heresy which 
was passed at the opening of 1401. By the provisions of 
this infamous Act the hindrances which had till now 
neutralized the efforts of the bishops to enforce the com- 
mon law were utterly taken away. Not only were they 
permitted to arrest all preachers of heresy, all school- 
masters infected with heretical teaching, all owners and 
writers of heretical books, and to imprison them even if 
they recanted at the King’s pleasure, but a refusal to ab- 
jure or a relapse after abjuration enabled them to hand 
over the heretic to the civil officers, and by these—so 
ran the first legal enactment of religious bloodshed which 
defiled our Statute-book—he was to be burned on a high 
place before the people. The statute was hardly passed 
when William Sautre became its first victim. Sautre, 
while a parish priest at Lynn, had been cited before 
the Bishop of Norwich two years before for heresy and 
forced to recant. But he still continued to preach against 
the worship of images, against pilgrimages, and against 
transubstantiation till the Statute of Heresy strengthened 
Arundel’s hands. In February, 1401, Sautre was brought 
before the Primate as a relapsed heretic, and on refusing 
to recant a second time was degraded from his orders, 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 493 


He was handed to the secular power, and on the issue of 
a royal writ publicly burned. 

The support of the nobles had been partly won by a 
hope hardly less fatal to the peace of the realm, the hope 
of a renewal of the strife with France. The peace of 
Richard’s later years had sprung not merely from the 
policy of the English King, but from the madness of 
Charles the Sixth of France. France fell into the hands 
of its king’s uncle, the Duke of Burgundy, and as the 
Duke was ruler of Flanders and peace with England was | 
a necessity for Flemish industry, his policy went hand 
in hand with that of Richard. His rival, the King’s 
brother, Lewis, Duke of Orleans, was the head of the 
French war-party ; and it was with the view of bringing 
about war that he supported Henry of Lancaster in his 
exile at the French court. Burgundy on the other hand 
listened to Richard’s denunciation of Henry as a traitor, 
and strove to prevent his departure. But his efforts 
were in vain, and he had to witness a revolution which 
hurled Richard from the throne, deprived Isabella of her 
crown, and restored to power the baronial party of which 
Gloucester, the advocate of war, had long been the head. 
The dread of war was increased by a pledge which Henry 
was said to have given at his coronation that he would 
not only head an army in its march into France but that 
he would march further into France than ever his grand- 
father had done. The French Court retorted by refusing 
to acknowledge Henry as King, while the truce concluded 
with Richard came at his death legally to an end. In 
spite of this defiance, however, Burgundy remained true 
to the interests of Flanders, and Henry clung to a truce 
which gave him time to establish his throne. But the 
influence of the baronial party in England made peace 
hard to keep; the Duke of Orleans urged on France to 
war; and the hatred of the two peoples broke through 
the policy of the two governments. Count Waleran of 
St. Pol, who had married Richard’s half-sister, put out 
to sea with a fleet which swept the east coast and entered 
the Channel. Pirates from Britanny and Navarre soon 
swarmed in the narrow seas, and their ravages were paid 


494 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


back by those of pirates from the Cinque Ports. A more 
formidable trouble broke out in the north. The enmity 
of France roused as of old the enmity of Scotland; the 
Scotch King Robert the Third refused to acknowledge 
Henry, and Scotch freebooters cruised along the northern 
coast. 

Attack from without woke attack from within the 
realm. Henry had shown little taste for bloodshed in 
his conduct of the revolution. Save those of the royal 
councillors whom he found at Bristol no one had been 
put to death. Though a deputation of lords with Arch- 
bishop Arundel at its head pressed him to take Richard's 
life, he steadily refused, and kept him a prisoner at 
Pomfret. The judgments against Gloucester, Warwick, 
and Arundel were reversed, but the lords who had 
appealed the Duke were only punished by the loss of the 
dignities which they had received as their reward. 
Richard’s brother and nephew by the half-blood, the 
Dukes of Surrey and Exeter, became again Earls of Kent 
and Huntingdon. York’s son, the Duke of Albemarle, 
sank once more into Earl of Rutland. Beaufort, Earl of 
Somerset, lost his new Marquisate of Dorset; Spenser 
lost his Earldom of Gloucester. But in spite of a stormy 
scene among the lords in Parliament Henry refused to 
exact further punishment; and his real temper was seen 
in a statute which forbade all such appeals and left 
treason to be dealt with by ordinary process of law. But 
the times were too rough for mercy such as this. Clouds 
no sooner gathered round the new King than the degraded 
lords leagued with the Earl of Salisbury and the deposed 
Bishop of Carlisle to release Richard and to murder 
Henry. Betrayed by Rutland in the Spring of 1401, and 
threatened by the King’s march from London, they fled 
to Cirencester; but the town was against them, its 
burghers killed Kent and Salisbury, and drove out the 
rest. A terrible retribution followed. Lord Spenser 
and the Earl of Huntingdon were taken and summarily 
beheaded ; thirty more conspirators fell into the King’s 
hands to meet the same fate. They drew with them in 
their doom the wretched prisoner in whose name they 


THE PARLIAMENT, 1307—1461 495 


had risen. A great council held after the suppression of 
the revolt prayed “that if Richard, the late King, be 
alive, aS some suppose he is, it be ordained that he be 
well and securely guarded for the safety of the states of 
the King and kingdom; but if he be dead, then that he 
be openly showed to the people that they may have 
knowledge thereof.” The, ominous words were soon 
followed by news of Richard’s death in prison. His 
body was brought to St. Paul’s, Henry himself with the 
prince’s of the blood royal bearing the pall: and the face | 
was left uncovered to meet rumors that the prisoner had 
been ‘assassinated by his keeper, Sir Piers Exton. 

In June Henry marched northward to end the trouble 
from the Scots. With their usual policy the Scottish 
army under the Duke of Albany withdrew as the English 
crossed the border, and looked coolly on while Henry 
invested the castle of Edinburgh. The wants of his army 
forced him in fact to raise the siege; but even success 
would have been fruitless, for he was recalled by trouble 
nearer home. Wales was in full revolt. The country 
had been devoted to Richard ; and so notorious was its 
disaffection to the new line that when Henry’s son knelt 
at his father’s feet to receive a grant of the Principality, 
a shrewd bystander murmured, “he must conquer it if 
he will have it.” The death of the fallen King only 
added to the Welsh disquiet, for in spite of the public 
exhibition of his body he was believed to be still alive. 
Some held that he had escaped to Scotland, and an im- 
postor who took his name was long maintained at the 
Scottish Court. In Wales it was believed that he was 
still a prisoner in Chester Castle. But the trouble 
would have died away had it not been raised into revolt 
by the energy of Owen Glyndwr or Glendower. Owen 
was a descendant of one of the last native Princes, 
Lleweln-ap-Jorwerth, and the lord of considerable estates 
in Merioneth. He had been squire of the body to 
Richard the Second, and had clung to him till he was 
seized at Flint. It was probably his known aversion 
from the revolution which had deposed his master that 
brought on him the hostility of Lord Grey of Ruthin, 


496 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 


the stay of the Lancastrian cause in North Wales; and 
the same political ground may have existed for the refusal 
of the Parliament to listen to his prayer for redress and 
for the restoration of the lands which Grey had seized. 
But the refusal was embittered by words of insult ; when 
the Bishop of St. Asaph warned them of Owen’s power 
the lords retorted that “they care not for barefoot 
knaves.” They were soon to be made to care. At the 
close of 1400 Owen rose in revolt, burned the town of 
Ruthin, and took the title of Prince of Wales. 

His action at once changed the disaffection into a na- 
tional revolt. His raids on the Marches and his capture 
of Radnor marked its importance, and Henry marched 
against him in the summer of 1401. But Glyndwr’s post 
at Corwen defied attack, and the pressure in the north 
forced the King to march away into Scotland. Henry 
Percy, who held the castles of North Wales as Constable, 
was left to suppress the rebellion, but Owen met Percy’s 
arrival by the capture of Conway, and the King was forced 
to hurry fresh forces under his son Henry to the west. 
The boy was too young as yet toshow the military and 
political ability which was to find its first field in these 
Welsh campaigns, and his presence did little to stay the 
growth of revolt. While Owen’s lands were being har- 
ried Owen was stirring the people of Caermarthen into 
rebellion and pressing the siege of Abergavenny; nor 
could the presence of English troops save Shropshire from 
pillage. Everywhere the Welshmen rose for their 
‘‘Prince;” the Bards declared his victories to have been 
foretold by Merlin; even the Welsh scholars at Oxford 
left the University in a body and joined his standard. 
The castles of Ruthin, Hawarden, and Flint fell into his 
hands, and with his capture of Conway gave him com- 
mand of North Wales. The arrival of help from Scotland 
and the hope of help from France gave fresh vigor to 
Owen’s action, and though Percy held his ground stub- 
bornly on the coast and even recovered Conway he at 
last threw up his command in disgust. <A fresh inroad of 
Henry on his return from Scotland again failed to bring 
Owen to battle, and the negotiations which he carried 


a 


THE PARLIAMENT, 1307—1461. 497 


on during the following winter were a mere blind to 
cover preparations for a new attack. So strong had 
Glyndwr become in 1402 that in June he wasable to face 
an English army in the open field at Brynglas and to de- 
feat it with a loss of a thousand men. The King again 
marched to the border to revenge this blow. But the 
storms which met him as he entered the hills, storms 
which his archers ascribed to the magic powers of Owen, 
ruined his army, andhe was forced to withdraw as of old. 
’ Araid over the northern border distracted the English » 
forces. A Scottish army entered England with the im- 
postor who bore Richard’s name, and though it was ut- 
terly defeated by Henry Percy in September at Homil- 
don Hill the respite had served Owen well. He sallied 
out from the inaccessible fastnesses in which he had held 
Henry at bay to win victories which were followed by 
the adhesion of all North Wales and of great part of 
South Wales to his cause. 

What gave life to these attacks and conspiracies was 
the hostility of France. The influence of the Duke of 
Burgundy was still strong enough to prevent any formal 
hostilities, but the war party was gaining more and more 
the ascendant. Its head, the Duke of Orleans, had 
fanned the growing flame by sending a formai defiance to 
Henry the Fourth as the murderer of Richard. French 
knights were among the prisoners whom the Percies took 
at Homildon Hill; and it may have been through their 
intervention that the Percies themselves were now brought 
into correspondence with the court of France. No house 
had piayed a greater part in the overthrow of Richard, or 
had been more richly rewarded by the new King. But 
old grudges existed between the house of Percy and the 
house of Lancaster. The Earl of Northumberland had 
been at bitter variance with John of Gaunt; and though 
a common dread of Richard’s enmity had thrown the 
Percies and Henry together the new King and his pow- 
erful subjects were soon parted again. Henry had ground 
indeed for distrust. The death of Richard left the young 
Mortimer, Earl of March, next claimant in blood of the 
crown, and the King had shown his sense of this danger 

. 32 


498 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


by imprisoning the earl and his sisters in the Tower. 
But this imprisonment made their uncle, Sir Edmund 
Mortimer, the representative of their house; and Edmund 
withdrew to the Welsh Marches, refusing to own Henry 
for king. The danger was averted by the luck which ~ 
threw Sir Edmund as a captive into the hands of Owen 
Glyndwr in the battle of Brynglas. It was natural that 
Henry should refuse to allow Mortimer’s kinsmen to ran- 
som so formidable an enemy; but among these kinsmen 
Henry Percy ranked himself through his marriage with 
Sir Edmund’s sister, and the refusal served as a pretext 
for a final breach with the King. 

Percy had withdrawn from the Welsh warin wrath at 
the inadequate support which Henry gave him ; and his 
anger had been increased by a delay in repayment of the 
sums spent by his house in the contest with Scotland, 
as well as by the King’sdemand that he should sutrender 
the Earl of Douglas whom he had taken prisoner at 
Homildon Hill. ‘He now became the centre of a great 
conspiracy to place the Earl of March upon the throne. 
His father, the Earl of Northumberland, his uncle, 
Thomas Percy, the Earl of Worcester, joined in the plot. 
Sir Edmund Mortimer negotiated for aid from Owen 
Glyndwr; the Earl of Douglas threw in his fortunes 
with the confederates ; and Henry Percy himself crossed 
to France and obtained promises of support. The war 
party had now gained the upper hand at the French 
court ; in 1403 preparations were made to attack Calais, 
and a Breton fleet put to sea. At the news of its pres- 
ence in the Channel Henry Percy and the Earl of 
Worcester at once rose in the north and struck across 
England to join Owen Glyndwr in Wales, while the 
Earl of Northumberland gathered a second army and 
advanced more slowly to their support. But Glyndwr 
was still busy with the siege of Caermarthen, and the 
King by a hasty march flung himself across the road of 
the Percies as they reached Shrewsbury. On the twenty- 
third of July a fight ended in the defeat of the rebel 
force. Henry Percy was slain in battle, the Earl of 
Worcester taken and beheaded ; while Northumberland. 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1807—1461. 499 


who had been delayed by an army under his rival in the 
north, Neville, Earl of Westmoreland, was thrown into 
prison, and only pardoned on his protestations of in- 
nocence. The quick, hard blow did its work. The 
young Earl of March betrayed the plans of his partisans 
to purchase pardon. The Breton fleet, which had de- 
feated an English fleet in the Channel and made a descent 
upon Plymouth, withdraw to its harbors; and though 
the Duke of Burgundy was on the point of commencing 
the siege of Calais the plans of an attack on that town 
were no more heard of. 

But the difficulty of Wales remained as great as ever. 
The discouragement of Owen at the failure of the con- 
spiracy of the Percies was removed by the open aid of 
the French Court. In July, 1404, the French King in a 
formal treaty owned Glyndwr as Prince of Wales, and 
his promises of aid gave fresh heart to the insurgents. 
What hampered Henry’s efforts most in meeting this 
danger was the want of money. At the opening of 1404 
the Parhament grudgingly gave a subsidy of a twentieth, 
but the treasury called for fresh supplies in October, and 
the wearied Commons fell back on their old proposal of 
a confiscation of Church property. Under the influence 
of Archbishop Arundel the Lords succeeded in quashing 
the project, and a new subsidy was voted; but the 
treasury was soon as empty as before. Treason was still 
rife; the Duke of York, who had played so conspicuous 
a part in Richard’s day as Earl of Rutland, was sent for 
a while to the Tower on suspicion of complicity in an 
attempt of his sister to release the Earl of March; and 
Glyndwr remained unconquerable. 

But fortune was now beginning to turn. The danger 
from Scotland was suddenly removed. King Robert re- 
solved to send his son James for training to the court of 
France, but the boy was driven to the English coast by a 
storm and Henry refused to release him. Had the Scots 
been friends, the King jested, they would have sent James 
to him for education, as he knew the French tongue quite 
as well as King Charles. Robert died of grief at the 
news: and Scotland fell into the hands of his brother, 


500 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH. PEOPLE. 


the Duke of Albany, whose one aim was that his nephew 
should remain a prisoner. James grew up atthe English 
Court; and prisoner though he was, the excellence of his 
training was seen in the poetry and intelligence of his 
later hfe. But with its King as a hostage Scotland was 
no longer to be dreaded as a foe. France too was weak- 
ened at this moment; for in 1405 the long smouldering 
jealousy between the Dukes of Orleans and of Burgundy 
broke out at last into open strife. The break did little 
indeed to check the desultory hostilities which were go- 
ing on. <A Breton fleet made descents on Portland and 
Dartmouth. The Count of Armagnac, the strongest 
supporter of Orleans and the war party, led troops against 
the frontier of Guienne. But the weakness of France 
and the exhaustion of its treasury prevented any formal 
denunciation of the truce or declaration of war. Though 
Henry could spare not a soldier for Guienne, Armagnac 
did little hurt. An English fleet repaid the ravages of 
the Bretons by harrying the coast of Britanny; and the 
turn of French politics soon gave Frenchmen too much 
work at home to spare men for work abroad. At the 
close of 1407 the murder of the Duke of Orleans by the 
order of the Duke of Burgundy changed the weak and 
fitful strife which had been going on into a struggle of 
the bitterest hate. The Count of Armagnac placed him- 
self at the head of the murdered duke’s partisans; and 
in their furious antagonism Armagnac and Burgundian 
alike sought aid from the English King. 

But the fortune which favored Henry elsewhere was 
still slow to turn in the West. In the opening of 1405 
the King’s son, Henry Prince of Wales, had taken the 
field against Glyndwr. Young as he was Henry was 
already a tried soldier. As a boy of thirteen he had 
headed an ineursion into Scotland in the year of his 
father’s accession to the throne. At fifteen he fought in 
the front of the royal army in the desperate fight at 
Shrewsbury. Slight and tall in stature as he seemed, he 
had outgrown the weakness of his earlier years and was 
vigorous and swift of foot; his manners were courteous, 
his air grave and reserved; and though wild tales ran of 


& 


THE PARLIAMENT, 1307—1461. 501 


revels and riots among his friends, the poets whom he 
favored and Lydgate whom he set to translate “ the drery 
piteous tale of himof Troy” saw in him a youth ‘“ both 
manful and vertuous.” There was little time indeed for 
mere riotin a life so busy as Henry’s, nor were many 
opportunities for self-indulgence to be found in campaigns 
against Glyndwr. What fitted the young general of 
seventeen for the thankless work in Wales was his stern, 
immovable will. But fortune as yet had few smiles for 
the King in this quarter, and his constant ill-success con- 
tinued too wake fresh troubles within England itself. 
The repulse of the young prince in a spring campaign in 
1405 was at once followed by a revolt in the north. The 
pardon of Northumberland had left him still a foe; the 
Earl of Nottingham was son of Henry’s opponent, the 
banished Duke of Norfolk; Scrope, Archbishop of York, 
was brother of Richard’s counsellor, the Earl of Wiltshire, 
who had been beheaded on the surrender of Bristol. 
Their rising in May might have proved a serious danger 
had not the treachery of Ralph Neville, the Earl of 
Westmoreland, who still remained steady to the Lancas- 
trian cause, secured the arrest of some of its leaders. 
Serope and Lord Nottingham were beheaded, while Nor- 
thumberland and his partisan Lord Bardolf fled into 
Scotland and from thence to Wales. Succors from France 
stirred the King to a renewed attack on Glyndwr in No- 
vember; but with the sameill-success. Stormsand want 
of food wrecked the English army and forced it to retreat ; 
a year of rest raised Glyndwr to new strength.; and when 
the. long promised body of eight thousand Frenchmen 
joined him in 1407 he ventured even to cross the border 
and to threaten Worcester. The threat was a vain one 
and the Welsh army soon withdrew; but the insult gave 
fresh heart to Henry's foes, and in 1408 Northumberland 
and Bardolf again appeared in the north. Their over- 
throw at Bramham Moor put an end to the danger from the 
Percies; for Northumberland and Bardolf alike fell on 
the field. But Wales remained as defiant as ever. In 
1409 a body of Welshmen poured ravaging into Shrop- 
shire; many of the English towns had fallen into Glyn- 


502 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


dwr’s hands ; and some of the marcher-lords made private 
truces with him. 

The weakness which was produced by this ill-suecess 
in the West as well as these constant battlings with dis- 
affection within the realm was seen in the attitude of the 
Lollards. Lollardry was far from having been crushed 
by the Statute of Heresy. The death of the Earl of 
Salisbury in the first of the revolts against Henry’s throne, 
though his gory head was welcomed into London by a 
procession of abbots and bishops who went out singing 
psalms of thanksgiving to meet it, only transferred the 
leadership of the party to one of the foremost warriors 
of the time, Sir John Oldcastle. If we believe his oppo- 
nents, and we have no information about him save from 
hostile sources, he was of lowly origin, and his rise must 
have been due to his own capacity and services to the 
Crown. In his youth he had listened to the preaching 
of Wyclif, and his Lollardry—if we may judge from its 
tone in later years—was a violent fanaticism. But this 
formed no obstacle to his rise in Richard’s reign; his mar- 
riage with the heiress of that house made him Lord Cob- 
ham; and the accession of Henry of Lancaster, to whose 
cause he seems to have clung in these younger days, 
brought him fairly to the front. His skill in arms found 
recognition in his appointment as sheriff of Herefordshire 
and as castellan of Brecknock; and he was among the 
leaders who were chosen in later years for service in 
France. His warlike renown endeared him to the King. 
and Prince Henry counted him among the most illustrious 
of his servants. The favor of the royal house was the 
more notable that Oldcastle was known as “ leader and 
captain ”’ of the Lollards. His Kentish castle of Cowling 
served asthe headquarters of the sect, and their preachers 
were openly entertained at his houses in London or on 
the Welsh border. The Convocation of 1413 charged 
him with being “ the principal receiver, favorer, protector, 
and defender of them ; and that, especially in the dioceses 
of London, Rochester, and Hereford, he hath sent out the 
said Lollards to preach .... and hath been present 
at their wicked sermons, grievously punishing with threat- 


THE PARLIAMENT. —13807T—1461. 503 


enings, terror, and the power of the secular sword such 
as did withstand them, alleging and affirming among other 
matters that we, the bishops, had no power to make any 
such Constitutions” as the Provincial Constitutions in 
which they had forbidden the preaching of unlicensed 
preachers. The bold stand of Lord Cobham drew fresh 
influence from the sanctity of his life. Though the 
clergy charged him with the foulest heresy, they owned 
that he shrouded it “ under a veil of holiness.” What 
chiefly moved their wrath was that he “ armed the hands | 
of laymen for the spoil of the Church.” The phrase 
seems to hint that Oldcastle was the mover in the re- 
peated attempts of the Commons to supply the needs of 
the state by a confiscation of Church property. In 1404 
they prayed that the needs of the kingdom might be de- 
frayed by a confiscation of Church lands, and though this 
prayer was fiercely met by Archbishop Arundel, it was 
renewed in 1410. The Commons declared as before that 
by devoting the revenues of the prelates to the service of 
the state maintenance could be made for fifteen earls, 
fifteen hundred knights, and six thousand squires, while 
a hundred hospitals might be established for the sick and 
infirm. Such proposals had been commonly made by the 
baronial party with which the house of Lancaster had in 
former days been connected, and hostile as they were to 
the Church as an establishment they had no necessary 
connexion with any hostility to its doctrines. Buta 
direct sympathy with Lollardism was seen in the further 
proposals of the Commons. They prayed for the abolition 
of episcopal jurisdiction over the clergy and for a mitiga- 
tion of the Statute of Heresy. 

But formidabie as the movement seemed it found a for- 
midable opponent. Thesteady fighting of Prince Henry 
had at last met the danger from Wales, and Glyndwr, 
though still unconquered, saw district after district sub- 
mit again to English rule. From Wales the Prince re- 
turned to bring his will to bear on England itself. It 
was through his strenuous opposition that the proposals 
of the Commons in 1410 were rejected by the Lords. 
He gave at the same moment a more terrible proof of 


504 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 


his loyalty to the Church in personally assisting at the 
burning of a layman, Thomas Badby, for a denial of 
transubstantiation. The prayers of the sufferer were 
taken for a recantation, and the Prince ordered the fire 
to be plucked away. But when the offer of life and a 
pension failed to break the spirit of the Lollard Henry 
pitilessly bade him be hurled back to his doom. The 
Prince was now the virtual ruler of the realm. His 
father’s earlier popularity had disappeared amidst the 
troubles and heavy -taxation of his reign. He was 
already a victim to the attack of epilepsy which brought 
him to the grave; and in the opening of 1410 the Parlia- 
ment called for the appointment of a Continual Council. 
The Council was appointed, and the Prince placed at its 
head. His energy was soon seen in a more active inter- 
position in the affairs of France. So bitter had the 
hatred grown between the Burgundian and Armagnac 
parties that both in turn appealed again to England for 
help. The Burgundian alliance found favor with the 
Council. In August, 1411, the Duke of Burgundy of- 
fered his daughter in marriage to the Prince as the price 
of English aid, and four thousand men, with Lord Cob- 
ham among their leaders, were sent to join his forces at 
Paris. Their help enabled Duke John to bring his op- 
ponents to battle at St. Cloud, and to win a decisive vic- 
tory in November. But already the King was showing 
himself impatient of the Council’s control; and the 
Parhameut significantly prayed that “as there had been 
a great murmur among your people that you have had 
in your heart a heavy load against some of your lieges 
come to this present Parliament,” they might be formally 
declared to be “faithful lieges and servants.” The 
prayer was granted, but in spite of the support which the 
Houses gave to the Prince, Henry the Fourth was reso- 
lute to assert his power. At the close of 1411 he de. 
clared his will to stand in as great freedom, prerogative, 
and franchise as any of his predecessors had done, and 
annulled on that ground the appointment of the Contin- 
ual Council. 

The King’s blow had been dealt at the instigation of 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 505 


his Queen, and it seems to have been prompted as much 
by a resolve to change the outer policy which the Prince 
had adopted as to free himself from the Council. The 
dismissal of the English troops by John of Burgundy 
after his victory at St. Cloud had irritated the English 
Court ; and the Duke of Orleans took advantage of this 
turn of feeling to offer Catherine, the Fr anth King’s 

daughter, in marriage to the Prince, and to promise the 
restoration of all that England claimed in Guienne and 
Poitou. In spite of the ‘efforts of the Prince and the 
Duke of Burgundy a treaty of alliance with Orleans was 
signed on these terms in May, 1412, and a force under 
the king’s second son, the Duke of Clarence, disembarked 
at La Hogue. But the very profusion of the Orleanist 
offers threw doubt on their sincerity. The Duke was only 
using the English aid to put a pressure on his antagonist, 
and its landing i in August at once brought John of Bur- 
gundy to a seeming submission. While Clarence pene- 
trated by Nor mandy and Maine into the Orleanois and a 
second English force sailed for Calais, both the French 
parties joined in pledging their services to King Charles 
“against his adversary of England.” Before this union 
Clarence was forced in November to accept promise of 
payment for his men from the Duke of Orleans and to 
fall back on Bordeaux. The failure no doubt gave fresh 
strength to Prince Henry. In the opening of 1412 he 
had been discharged from the Council and Clarence set 
in his place at its head; he had been defeated in his at- 
tempts to renew the Burgundian alliance, and had striven 
in vain to hinder Clarence from sailing. The break grew 
into an open quarrel. Letters were sent into various 
counties refuting the charges of the Prince’s detractors, 
and in September Henry himself appeared before his 
father with a crowd of his friends and supporters de- 
manding the punishment of those who accused him. 
The charges made against him were that he sought to 
bring about the King’s removal from the throne ; and 
“the great recourse of people unto him, of which his 
court was at all times more abundant than his father’s,” 
gave color to the accusation. Henry the Fourth owned 


506 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


his belief in these charges, but promised to call a»Parlia- 
ment for his son’s vindication; and the Parliament met 
in the February of 1413. But a new attack of epilepsy 
had weakened the King’s strength ; and though galleys 
were gathered for a Crusade which he had vowed le was 
too weak to meet the Houses on their assembly. If we 
may trust a charge which was afterwards denied, the 
King’s half-brother, Bishop Henry of Winchester, one of 
the Beaufort children of John of Gaunt, acting in secret 
co-operation with the Prince, now brought the peers to 
pray Henry to*suffer his son to be crowned in his stead. 
Lhe King’s refusal was the last act of a dying man. Be- 
fore the end of March he breathed his last in the “ Jeru- 
salem Chamber” within the Abbot’s house at Westmin- 
ster; and the Prince obtained the Crown which he had 
sought. 

The removal of Archbishop Arundel from the Chan- 
cellorship, which was given to Henry Beaufort of Win- 
chester, was among the first acts of Henry the Fifth; and 
it is probable that this blow at the great foe of the Lol- 
lards gave encouragement to the hopes of Oldcastle. He 
seized the opportunity of the coronation in April to press 
his opinions on the young King, though probably rather 
with a view to the plunder of the Church than to any 
directly religious end. From the words of the clerical 
chroniclers it is plain that Henry had no mind as yet for 
any open strife with either party, and that he quietly put 
the matter aside. He was in fact busy with foreign af- 
fairs. The Duke of Clarence was recalled from Bor- 
deaux, and a new truce concluded with France. ‘The 
policy of Henry was clearly to look on for awhile at the 
shifting politics of the distracted kingdom. Soon after 
his accession another revolution in Paris gave the charge 
of the mad King Charles, and with it the nominal govern- 
ment of the realm, to the Duke of Orleans; and his 
cause derived fresh strength from the support of the 
young Dauphin, who was afterwards to play so great a 
part in the history of France as Charles the Seventh. 
John of Burgundy withdrew to Flanders, and both 
parties again sought Henry’s aid. But his hands weve 


THE PARLIAMENT. 13807—1461. 507 


tied as yet by trouble at home. Oldcastle was far from 
having abandoned his projects, discouraged as they had 
been by his master; while the suspicions of Henry’s 
favor to the Lollard cause which could hardly fail to be 
roused by his favor to the Lollard leader only spurred 
the bold spirit of Arundel to energetic action. <A 
council of bishops gathered in the summer to denounce 
Lollardry and at once called on Henry to suffer Oldcastle 
to be brought to justice. ‘The King pleaded for delay 
in the case of one who was so close a friend, and strove 
personally to convince Lord Cobham of his errors. All 
however was in vain, and Oldcastle withdrew to his 
castle of Cowling, while Arundel summoned him before 
his court and convicted him asa heretic. His open de- 
fiance at last forced the King to act. In September a 
body of royal troops arrested Lord Cobham and carried 
him to the Tower; but his life was still spared, and after 
a month’s confinement his imprisonment was relaxed on 
his promise of recantation. Cobham however had now 
resolved on open resistance. He broke from the Tower 
in November, and from his hiding-place organized a vast 
revolt. At the opening of 1414 a secret order sum- 
moned the Lolards to assemble in St. Giles’s Fields out- 
side London. We gather, if not the real aims of the 
rising, at least the terror it caused, from Henry’s state- 
ment that its purpose was “to destroy himself, his 
brothers, and several of the spiritual and temporal 
lords ;”’ from Cobham’s later declarations it is probable 
that the pretext of the rising was to release Richard, 
whom he asserted to be still alive, and to set him again 
on the throne. But the vigilance of the young King 
prevented the junction of the Lollards within the city 
with their confederates without, and these as they ap- 
peared at the place of meeting were dispersed by the 
royal troops. | 
The failure of the rising only increased the rigor of 
the law. Magistrates were directed to arrest all heretics 
and hand them over to the bishops; a conviction of 
heresy was made to entail forfeiture of blood and estate ; 
and the execution of thirty-nine prominent Lollards as 


508 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


traitors gave terrible earnest of the King’s resolve to sup- 
press their sect. Oldcastle escaped, and for four years 
longer strove to rouse revolt after revolt. He was at 
last captured on the Welsh border and burned as a 
heretic; but from the moment when his attempt at re- 
volt was crushed in St. Giles’s Fields the dread of Lol- 
lardry was broken and Henry was free to take a more 
energetic course of policy on the other side of the sea. 
He had already been silently preparing for action by 
conciliatory measures, by restoring Henry Percy’s son 
to the Earidom of Northumberland, by the release of the 
Earl of March, and by the solemn burial of Richard the 
Second at Westminster. The supression of the Lollard 
revolt was followed by a demand for the restoration of 
the English possessions in France, and by alliances and 
prepar ations for war, Burgundy stood aloof in a sullen 
neutrality, and the Duke of Orleans, who was now vir- 
tually ruler of the French kingdom, in vain proposed 
concession after concession. All negotiation indeed 
broke down when Henry formally put forward his claim 
on the crown of France. No claim could have been more 
utterly baseless, for the Parliamentary title by which the 
House of Lancaster held England could give it no right 
over France, and the strict law of hereditar y succession 
which Edward asserted could be pleaded, if pleaded at 
all, only by the House of Mortimer. Not only the claim 
indeed, but the very nature of the war itself was wholly 
different from that of Edward the Third. Edward had 
been forced into the struggle against his will by the 
ceaseless attacks of France, and his claim of the crown 
was little but an afterthought to secure the alliance of 
Flanders. The war of Henry on the other hand, though 
in form a mere renewal of the earlier struggle on the 
close of the truce made by Richard the Second, was in 
fact an aggression on the part of a nation tempted by 
the helplessness of its opponent and galled by the mem- 
ory of former defeat. Its one excuse lay in the attacks 
which France for the past fifteen years had directed 
against the Lancastrian throne, its encouragement of 
every enemy without and of every traitor within. 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 509 
Henry may fairly have regarded such a ceaseless hostility, 
continued even through years of weakness, as forcing 
him in sheer self-defence to secure his realm against the 
weightier attack which might be looked for, should 
France recover her strength. 

In the summer of 1415 the King prepared to sail from 
Southampton, when a plot reminded him of the insecurity 
of his throne. The Earl of March was faithful: but he 
was childless, and his claim would pass at his death 
through a sister who had wedded the Earl of Cambridge, 
ason of the Duke of York, to her child Richard, the 
Duke who was to play so great a part in the War of the 
Roses. It was to secure his boy’s claims that the Earl 
of Cambridge seized on the King’s departure to conspire 
with Lord Scrope and Sir Thomas Grey to proclaim the 
Karl of March King. The plot however was discovered 
and the plotters beheaded before the King sailed in 
August for the Norman coast. His first exploit was the 
capture of Harfleur. Dysentery made havoc in his ranks 
during the siege, and it was with a mere handful of men 
that he resolved to insult the enemy by a daring like 
that of Edward upon Calais. The discord however on 
which he probably reckoned for security vanished before 
the actual appearance of the invaders in the hearv of 
France; and when his weary and half-starved force suc- 
ceeded in crossing the Somme it found sixty thousand 
Frenchmen encamped on the field of Agincourt right 
across its line of march. Their position, flanked on - 
either side by woods, but with a front so narrow that 
the dense masses were drawn up thirty men deep, 
though strong for purposes of defence was ill suited for 
attack ; and the French leaders, warned by the ex- 
perience of Crecy and Poitiers, resolved to await the 
English advance. Henry on the other hand had no 
choice between attack and unconditional surrender. His 
troops were starving, and the way to Calais lay across 
the French army. But the King’s courage rose with 
the peril. A knight in his train wished that the thou- 
sands of stout warriors lying idle that night in England 
had been standing in his ranks. Henry answered with 


510 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


a burst of scorn. ‘I would not have a single man more,” 
he replied. “If God give us the victory, it will be plain 
we owe it to His grace. If not, the fewer we are, the 
less loss for England.” Starving and sick as they were, 
the handful of men whom he led shared the spirit of 
their king. As the chill rainy night passed away he 
drew up his army on the twenty-fifth of October and 
boldly gave battle. English archers bared their arms 
and breasts to give fair play to “the crooked stick and 
the grey goose wing,” but for which—as the rime ran 
— England were but a fling,” and with a great shout 
sprang forward to the attack. The sight of their ad- 
vance roused the fiery pride of the French; the wise 
resolve of their leaders was forgotten, and the dense 
mass of men-at-arms plunged heavily forward through 
miry ground on the English front. But at the first sign 
of movement Henry had halted his line, and fixing in 
the ground the sharpened stakes with which each man 
was furnished his archers poured their fatal arrow flights 
into the hostile ranks. ‘The carnage was terrible, for 
though the desperate charges of the French knighthood 
at last drove the English archers to the neighboring 
woods, from the skirt of these woods they were still able 
to pour their shot into the enemy’s flanks, while Henry 
with the men-at-arms round him flung himself on the 
French line. In the terrible struggle which followed 
. the King bore off the palm of bravery: he was felled 
once by a blow from a French mace and the crown of 
his helmet was cleft by the sword of the Duke of Alen- 
con; but the enemy was at last broken, and the defeat 
of the main body of the French was followed by the 
rout of their reserve. The triumph was more complete, 
as the odds were even greater, than at Cregy. Eleven 
thousand Frenchmen lay dead on the field, and more 
than a hundred princes and great lords were among 
the fallen. 

The immediate result of the battle of Agincourt was 
small, for the English army was too exhausted for pur- 
suit, and it made its way to Calais only to return to 
England. Through 1416 the war was limited to a con- 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1807—1461. o1L 


test for the command of the Channel, till the increasing 
bitterness of the strife between the Burgundians and 
Armagnacs and the consent of John of Burgundy to con- 
clude an alliance encouraged Henry to resume his at- 
tempt to recover Normandy. Whatever may have been 
his aim in this enterprise—whether it were, as has been 
suggested, to provide a refuge for his house, should its 
power be broken in England, or simply to acquire a com- 
mand of the seas—the patience and skill with which his 
object was accomplished raise him high in the rank of 
military leaders. Disembarking in July 1417 with an 
army of forty thousand men near the mouth of the 
~Touque, he stormed Caen, received the surrender of 
Bayeux, reduced Alencon and Falaise, and detaching his 
brother the Duke of Gloucester in the spring of 1418 to 
occupy the Cotentin made himself master of Avranches 
and Domfront. With Lower Normandy wholly in his 
hands, he advanced upon Evreux, captured Louviers, 
and seizing Pont de |’Arche, threw his troops across the 
Seine. The end of these masterly movements was now re- 
vealed. Rouen was at this time the largest and wealthiest 
of the towns of France; its walls were defended by a 
powerful artillery; Alan Blanchard, a brave and resolute 
patriot, infused the fire of his own temper into the vast 
population ; and the garrison, already strong, was backed 
by fifteen thousand citizens in arms. But the genius of 
Henry was more than equal to the difficulties with which 
he had to deal. He had secured himself from an attack 
on his rear by the reduction of Lower Normandy, his 
earlier occupation of Harfleur severed the town from the 
sea, and his conquest of Pont de l’Arche cut it off from 
relief on the side of Paris. Slowly but steadily the King 
drew his lines of investment round the doomed city; a 
flotilla was brought up from Harfleur, a bridge of boats 
thrown over the Seine above the town, the deep trenches 
of the besiegers protected by posts, and the desperate 
sallies of the garrison stubbornly beaten back. For six 
months Rouen held resolutely out, but famine told fast 
on the vast throng of country folk who had taken refuge 
within its walls. Twelve thousand of these were at last 


§12 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


thrust out of the city gates, but the cold policy of the 
conqueror refused them passage, and they perished be- 
tween the trenches and the walls. In the hour of their 
agony women gave birth to infants, but even the new- 
born. babes which were drawn up in baskets to receive 
baptism were lowered again to die on their mother’s 
breasts. It was httle better within the town itself. As 
winter drew on one-half of the population wasted away. 
“ War,” said the terrible King, ‘ has three handmaidens 
ever waiting on her, Fire, Blood, and Famine, and I have 
chosen the meekest maid of the three.” But his demand 
of unconditional surrender nerved the citizens to a re- 
solve of despair; they determined to fire the city and 
fling themselves in a mass on the English lines; and 
Henry, fearful lest his prize should escape him at the 
last, was driven to offer terms. Those who rejected a 
foreign yoke were suffered to leave the city, but his ven- 
veance reserved its victim in Alan Blanchard, and the 
brave patriot was at Henry’s orders put to death in cold 
blood. | | 

A few sieges completed the reduction of Normandy. 
The King’s designs were still limited to the acquisition 
of the province; and pausing in his career of conquest, 
he strove to win its loyalty by a remission of taxation 
and a redress of grievances, and to seal its possession by 
a formal peace with the French Crown. The conferences 
however which were held for this purpose at Pontoise in 
1419 failed through the temporary reconciliation of the 
French factions, while the length and expense of the war 
began to rouse remonstrance and discontent at home. 
The King’s difficulties were at their height when the 
assassination of John of Burgundy at Montereau in the 
very presence of the Dauphin with whom he had come 
to hold conference rekindled the fires of civil strife. The 
whole Burgundian party with the new Duke of Bur- 
gundy, Philip the Good, at its head flung itself in a wild 
thirst for revenge into Henry’s hands. The mad King, 
Charles the Sixth, with his Queen and daughters were 
in Philip’s power; and in his resolve to exclude the 
Dauphin from the throne the Duke stooped to buy Eng- 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 513 


glish aid by giving Catherine, the eldest of the French 
princesses, in marriage to Henry, by conferring on him 
the Regency during the life of Charles, and recognizing 
his succession to the crown at that sovereign’s death. A 
treaty which embodied these terms was solemnly ratified 
by Charles himself in a conference at Troyes in May 
1420; and Henry, who in his new capacity of Regent 
undertook to conquer in the name of his father-in-law 
the territory held by the Dauphin, reduced the towns 
of the Upper Seine and at Christmas entered Paris in 
triumph side by side with the King. The States-General 
of the realm were solemnly convened to the capital; and 
strange as the provisions of the Treaty of Troyes must 
have seemed they were confirmed without a murmur. 
Henry was formally recognized as the future sovereign 
of France. A defeat of his brother Clarence at Baugé 
in Anjou in the spring of 1421 called him back to the 
war. His re-appearance in the field was marked by the 
capture of Dreux, and a repulse before Orleans was re- 
deemed in the summer of 1422 by his success in the long 
and obstinate siege of Meaux. At no time had the for- 
tunes of Henry reached a higher pitch than at the mo- 
ment when he felt the touch of death. In the month 
which followed the surrender of Meaux he fell ill at 
Corbeuil; the rapidity of his disease baffled the skill 
of the physicians; and at the close of August, with a 
strangely characteristic regret that he had not lived to 
achieve the conquest of Jerusalem, the great Conqueror 
passed away. 
33 


CHAPTER VI. 
THE WARS OF THE ROSES. 
1422-1461. 


At the moment when death so suddenly stayed his 
course the greatness of Henry the Fifth had reached its 
highest point. In England his victories had hushed the 
last murmurs of disaffection. ‘The death of the Earl of 
Cambridge, the childhood of his son, removed all danger 
from the claims of the house of York. ‘The ruin of Lord 
Cobham, the formal condemnation of Wyclif’s doctrines 
in the Council of Constance, broke the political and the 
religious strength of Lollardry. Henry had won the 
Church by his orthodoxy, the nobles by his warlike 
prowess, the whole people by his revival of the glories of 
Cregy and Poitiers. In France his cool policy had trans- 
formed him from a foreign conqueror into a legal heir to 
the Crown. The king was in his hands, the Queen de- 
voted to his cause, the Duke of Burgundy was his ally, 
his title of Regent and of successor to the throne rested 
on the formal recognition of the estates of the realm. 
Although southern France still clung to the Dauphin, 
the progress of Henry to the very moment of his death 
promised a speedy mastery of the whole country. His 
European position was a commanding one. Lord of the 
two great western kingdoms, he was linked by close ties 
of blood with the royal lines of Portugal and Castille ; 
and his restless activity showed itself in his efforts to 
procure the adoption of his brother John as her successor 
by the Queen of Naples and in the marriage of a younger 
brother, Humphrey, with Jacqueline, the Countess of 
Holland ong Hainault. Dreams of a vaster enterprise 

(3 


THE PARLIAMENT. 13807—1461. 5Lh 


filled the soul of the great conqueror himself; he loved 
to read the story of Godfrey of Bouillon and cherished 
the hope of a crusade which should beat back the Otto- 
man and again rescue the Holy Land from heathen hands. 
Such a crusade might still have saved Constantinople, 
and averted from Europe the danger which threatened 
it through the century that followed the fall of the im- 
perial city. Nor was the enterprise a dream in the hands 
of the cool, practical warrior and ruler of whom a con- 
temporary could say “ he transacts all his affairs himself, 
he considers well before he undertakes them, he never 
does anything fruitlessly. 

But the hopes of far off conquests found a sudden close 
in Henry’s death. His son, Henry the Sixth of England, 
was a child of but nine months old: and though he was 
peacefully recognized as King in his English realm and 
as heir to the throne in the realm of France, his position 
was a very different one from his father’s. The death of 
King Charles indeed, two months after that of his son- 
in-law, did little to weaken it; and at first nothing 
seemed lost. The Dauphin at once proclaimed himself 
Charles the Seventh of Fiance: but Henry was owned 
as Sovereign over the whole of the territory which Charles 
had actually ruled; and the incursions which the parti- 
sans of Charles, now reinforced by Lombard soldiers from 
the Milanese and by four thousand Scots under the Earl 
of Douglas, made with fresh vigor across the Loire were 
easily repulsed by Duke John of Bedford, the late King’s 
brother, who had been named in his will Regent of 
France. In genius for war as in political capacity John 
was hardly inferior to Henry himself. Drawing closer his 
alliance with the Duke of Burgundy by marriage to that 
prince’s sister, and holding that of Britanny by a patient 
diplomacy, he completed the conquest of Northern 
France, secured his communications with Normandy by 
the capture of Meulan, and made hinself master of the 
line of the Yonne by a victory near Auxerre. In 1424 
the Constable of Buchan pushed from the Loire to the 
very borders of Normandy to arrest his progress, and at- 
tacked the English army at Verneuil. But a repulse 


516 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


hardly less disastrous than that of Agincourt left a third 
of the French knighthood on the field: and the Regent 
was preparing to cross the Loire for a final struggle with 
“the King of Bourges” as the English in mockery called 
Charles the Seventh when his career of victory was 
broken by troubles at home. Es 

In England the Lancastrian throne was still too newly 
established to remain unshaken by the succession of a 
child of nine months old. Nor was the younger brother 
of Henry the Fifth, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, whom 
the late King’s will named as Regent of the realm, a man 
of the same noble temper as the Duke of Bedford. In- 
tellectually the figure of Humphrey is one of extreme in- 
terest for he is the first Englishman in whom we can 
trace the faint influence of that revival of knowledge 
which was to bring about the coming renascence of the 
western world. Humphrey was not merely a patron of 
poets and men of letters, of Lydgate and William of 
Worcester and Abbot Whethamstede of St. Alban’s, as 
his brother and other princes of the day had been, but 
his patronage seems to have sprung from a genuine in- 
terest in learning itself. He was a zealous collector of 
books and was able to bequeath to the University of Ox- 
ford a library of a hundred and thirty volumes. A gift 
of books indeed was a passport to his favor, and before 
the title of each volume he possessed the Duke wrote 
words which expressed his love of them, ‘moun bien 
mondain,” “my worldly goods!” Lydgate tells us how 
“ notwithstanding his state and dignyte his corage never 
doth appalle to studie in books of antiquitie.” His 
studies drew him to the revival of classic learning which 
was becoming a passion across the Alps. One wandering 
scholar from Forli, who took the pompous name of Titus 
Livius and who wrote at his request the biography of 
Henry the Fifth, Humphrey made his court poet and 
orator. The duke probably aided Poggi Bracciolini in 
his search for classical manuscripts when he visited Eng- 
land in 1420. Leonardo Aretino, one of thescholars who 
gathered about Cosmo de Medici, dedicated to him a 
translation of the Politics of Aristotle, and when another 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1807—1461. 517 


Italian scholar sent him a fragment of a translation of 
Plato’s Republic the Duke wrote to beg him to send the 
rest. But with its love of learning Humphrey combined 
the restlessness, the immorality, the selfish, boundless 
ambition which characterized the age of the Renascence. 
His life was sullied by sensual excesses, his greed of 
power shook his nephew’s throne. So utterly was he 
already distrusted that the late King’s nomination of 
him as Regent was set aside by the royal Council, and 
he was suffered only to preside at its deliberations with 
the nominal title of Protector during Bedford’s absence. 
The real direction of affairs fell into the hands of his 
uncle, Henry Beaufort, the Bishop of Winchester, a legit- 
imated son of John of Gaunt by his mistress Catharine 
Swynford. 

Two years of useless opposition disgusted the Duke 
with this nominal Protectorship, and in 1424 he left the 
realm to push his fortunes in the Netherlands. Jacque- 
line, the daughter and heiress of William, Count of Hol- 
land and Hainault, had originally wedded John, Duke of 
Brabant; but after a few ygars of strife she had procured 
a divorce from one of the three claimants who now dis- 
puted the Papacy, and at the close of Henry the Fifth’s 
reign she had sought shelterin England. At his brother’s 
death the Duke of Gloucester avowed his marriage with 
her and adopted her claims as hisown. To support them 
in arms however was to alienate Philip of Burgundy, who 
was already looking forward to the inheritance of his 
childless nephew, the Duke of Brabant; and as the alli- 
ance with Burgundy was the main strength of the English 
cause in France, neither Bedford, who had shown his 
sense of its value by a marriage with the Duke’s sister, 
nor the English council were likely to support measures 
which would imperil or weaken it. Such considerations 
however had little weight with Humphrey; and in October 
1424 he set sail for Calais without their knowledge with 
a body of five thousand men. Ina few months he suc- 
ceeded in restoring Hainault to Jacqueline, and Philip at 
once grew lukewarm in his adherence to the English 
cause. Though Bedford’s efforts prevented any final 


518 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


break, the Duke withdrew his forces from France to aid 
John of Brabant in the recovery of Hainault and Holland. 
Gloucester challenged Philip to decide their claims by 
single combat. But the enterprise was abandoned as 
hastily as it had been begun. The Duke of Gloucester 
was already disgusted with Jacqueline and enamoured of 
a lady in her suite, Eleanor, the daughter of Lord Cob- 
ham; and in the summer of 1425 he suddenly returned 
with her to England and left his wife to defend herself 
as she might. 

What really called him back was more than his passion 
for Eleanor Cobham or the natural versatility of his tem- 
per; it was the advance of a rival in England to further 
power over the realm. ‘This was his uncle, Henry Beau- 
fort, Bishop of Winchester. The Bishop had already 
played a leading political part. He was charged with 
having spurred Henry the Fifth to the ambitious demands 
of power which he made during his father’s lifetime; he 
became chancellor on his accession ; and at his death the 
King left him guardian of the person of his boy. He 
looked on Gloucester’s seg as a danger to his charge, 
withstood his recognition as Regent, and remained at the 
head of the Council that reduced his office of Protector 
toaname. The Duke’s absence in Hainault gave fresh 
strength to his opponent: and the nomination of the 
Bishop to the chancellorship marked him outas the virtual 
ruler of the realm. On the news of this appointment 
Gloucester hurried back.to accept what he looked on as 
a challenge to open strife. The Londoners rose in his 
name to attack Beaufort’s palace in Southwark, and at 
the close of 1425 Bedford had to quit his work in France 
to appease the strife. In the following year Gloucester 
laid a formal bill of accusation against the Bishop before 
the Parliament, but its rejection forced him to a show of 
reconciliation, and Bedford was able to return to France. 
Hardly was he gone however when the quarrel began 
anew. Humphrey found a fresh weapon against Beaufort 
in his acceptance of the dignity of a Cardinal and of a 
Papal Legate in England; and the jealousy which this 
step aroused drove the Bishop to withdraw for a while 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 519 


from the Council and to give place to this unscrupulous 
Opponent. 

Beaufort possessed an administrative ability, the loss 
of which was a heavy blow to the struggling Regent 
over sea, where Humphrey’s restless ambition had al- 
ready paralyzed Bedford’s efforts. Much of his strength 
rested on his Burgundian ally, and the force of Burgundy 
was drawn to other quarters. Though Hainault had 
been easily won back on Gloucester’s retreat and Jac- 
queline taken prisoner, her escape from prison enabled 
her to hold Holland for three years against the forces of 
the Duke of Brabant and after his death against those of 
the Duke of Burgundy to whom he bequeathed his 
dominions. The political strife in England itself was 
still more fatal in diverting the.supplies of men and 
money which were needful for a vigorous prosecution of 
the war. To maintain even the handful of forces left to 
him Bedford was driven to have recourse to mere forays 
which did little but increase the general misery. The 
north of France indeed was being fast reduced to a desert 
by the bands of marauders which traversed it. The hus- 
bandmen fled for refuge to the towns till these in fear of 
famine shut their gates against them. Then in their de- 
spair they threw themselves into the woods and became 
brigands in their turn. So terrible was the devastation 
that two hostile bodies of troops failed at one time even 
to find one another in the desolate Beauce. Misery and 
disease killed a hundred thousand people in Paris alone. 
At last the cessation of the war in Holland and the tem- 
porary lull of strife in England enabled the Regent to 
take up again his long interrupted advance upon the 
South. Orleans was the key to the Loire; and its re- 
duction would throw open Bourges where Charles held 
his court. Bedford’s resources indeed were still inade- 
quate for such a siege; and though the arrival of rein- 
forcements from England under the Earl of Salisbury 
enabled him to invest it in October 1428 with ten thou- 
sand men, the fact that so small a force could undertake 
the siege of such a town as Orleans shows at once the 
exhaustion of England and the terror which still hung 


520 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


over France. As the siege went on however even these 
numbers were reduced. A new fit of jealousy on the 
part of the Duke of Burgundy brought about a recall 
of his soldiers from the siege, and after their with- 
drawal only three thousand Englishmen remained in the 
trenches. But the long series of English victories had 
so demoralized the French soldiery that in February 1429, 
amere detachment of archers under Sir John Fastolfe 
repulsed a whole army in what was called ‘the Battle of 
the Herrings,’ from the convoy of provisions which the 
victors brought in triumph into the camp before Orleans. 
Though the town swarmed with men-at-arms not a single 
sally was ventured on through the six months’ siege, and 
Charles the Seventh did nothing for its aid but shut him- 
self up in Chinon and»weep helplessly. 

But the success of this handful of besiegers rested 
wholly on the spell of terror which had been cast over 
France, and.at this moment the appearance of a peasant 
maiden broke the spell. Jeanne Dare was the child of a 
laborer of Domremy, a little village in the neighborhood 
of Vaucouleurs on the borders of Lorraine and Cham- 
pagne. Just without the cottage where she was born 
began the great woods of the Vosges where the children 
of Domremy drank in poetry and legend from fairy ring 
and haunted well, hung their flower garlands on the 
sacred trees, and sang songs to the “good people’’ who 
might not drink of the fountain because of their sins. 
Jeanne loved the forest; its birds and beasts came loy- 
ingly to her at her childish call. But at home men saw 
nothing in her but “a good girl, simple and pleasant in 
her ways,” spinning and sewing by her mother’s side 
while the other girls went to the fields, tender to the 
poor and sick, fond of church, and lstening to the 
church-bell with a dreamy passion of delight which never 
left her. This quiet life was broken by the storm of war 
as it at last came home to Domremy. As the outcasts 
and wounded passed by the little village the young 
peasant girl gave them her bed and nursed them in their 
sickness. Her whole nature summed itself up in one 
absorbing passion: she “had pity,” to use the phrase for- 


THE PARLIAMENT, 1807—1461. G28 | 


ever on her lip, ‘on the fair realm of France.” As her 
passion grew she recalled old prophecies that a maid 
from the Lorraine border should save the land; she saw 
visions ; St. Michael appeared to her in a flood of blind- 
ing light, and bade her go to the help of the King and 
restore to him his realm. ‘“ Messire,” answered the girl, 
“Tam buta poor maiden; I know not how to ride to the 
wars, or to lead men-at-arms.”” The archangel returned 
to give her courage, and to tell her of “the pity” that 
there was in heaven for the fair realm of France. The 
- girl wept and longed that the angels who appeared to her 
would carry her away, but her mission was clear. It was 
in vain that her father when he heard her purpose swore 
to drown her ere she should go to the field with men-at- 
arms. It was in vain that the priest, the wise people of 
the village, the captain of Vaucouleurs, doubted and re- 
fused to aid her. “I must go to the King,” persisted the 
peasant girl, “even if I wear my limbs to the very 
knees.” ‘I had far rather rest and spin by my mother’s 
side,’ she pleaded with a touching pathos, “ for this is 
no work of my choosing, but I must go and do it, for my 
Lord wills it.” ‘And who,” they asked, ‘is your Lord?” 
“He is God.’ Words such as these touched the rough 
captain at last: he took Jeanne by the hand and swore 
to lead her to the King. She reached Chinon in the 
opening of March, but here too she found hesitation and 
doubt. The theologians proved from their books that 
they ought not to believe her. ‘There is more in God’s 
book than in yours,” Jeanne answered simply. At last 
Charles himself received her in the midst of a throng of 
nobles and soldiers. ‘Gentle Dauphin,” said the girl, 
‘my ame is Jeanne the Maid. The Heavenly King 
sends me to tell you that you shall be anointed and 
crowned in the town of Rheims, and you shall be 
lieutenant of the Heavenly King who is the King of 
France.” 

Orleans had already been driven by famine to offers of 
surrender when Jeanne appeared in the French: court, 
and a force was gathering under the Count of Dunois at 
Blois for a final effort at its relief. It was at the head 


522 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 


of this force that Jeanne placed herself. The girl was 
in her eighteenth year, tall, finely formed, with all the 
vigor and activity of her peasant rearing, able to stay 
from dawn to nightfall on horseback without meat or 
drink. As she mounted her charger, clad in white armor 
from head to foot, with a great white banner studded 
with fleur-de-lys waving over her head, she seemed “a 
thing wholly divine, whether to see or hear.” The ten 
thousand men-at-arms who followed her from Blois, rough 
plunderers whose only prayer was that of La Hire, “ Sire 
Dieu, I pray you todo for La Hire what La Hire would - 
do for you, were you captain-at-arms and he God,” left off 
their oaths and foul living at her word and gathered round 
the altars on their march. Her shrewd peasant humor 
helped her to manage the wild soldiery, and her followers 
laughed over their camp-fires at an old warrior who had 
been so puzzled by her prohibition of oaths that she 
suffered him still to swear by his baton. For in the 
midst of her enthusiasm her good sense never left her.- 
The people crowded round her as she rode along, pray- 
ing her to work miracles, and bringing crosses and 
chaplets to be blest by her touch. “Touch them your 
self,” she said to an old Dame Margaret ; “ your touch, 
will be just as good as mine.” But her faith in her 
mission remained as firm as ever. ‘The Maid prays 
and requires you,’ she wrote to Bedford, “to work no 
more distraction in France but to come in her company 
to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the Turk.” “TI bring 
you,” she told Dunois when he sallied out of Orleans 
to meet her after her two days’ march from Blois, “T 
bring you the best aid ever sent to any one, the aid of 
the King of Heaven.” The besiegers looked on overawed 
as she entered Orleans and, riding round the walls bade 
the people shake off their fear of the forts which sur- 
rounded them. Her enthusiasm drove the hesitating 
generals to engage the handful of besiegers, and the 
enormous disproportion of forces at once made itself 
felt. Fort after fort was taken till only the strongest 
remained, and then the council of war resolved to ad- 
journ the attack. “You have taken your counsel,” 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 5 Ze 


replied Jeanne, “and I take imine.” Placing herself at 
the head of the men-at-arms, she ordered the gates to 
be thrown open, and led them against the fort. Few 
as they were, the English fought desperately, and the 
Maid, who had fallen wounded while endeavoring to 
scale its walls, was borne into a vineyard, while Dunois 
sounded the retreat. ‘“ Wait awhile!” the girl imperi- 
ously pleaded, “ eat and drink! so soon as my standard 
touches the wall you shall enter the fort.” It touched, 
and the assailants burst in. On the next day the siege 
was abandoned and on the eighth of May the force which 
had conducted it withdrew in good order to the north. 

In the midst of her triumph Jeanne still remained the 
pure, tender-hearted peasant girl of the Vosges. Her 
first visit as she entered Orleans was to the great church, 
and there, as she knelt at mass, she wept in such a 
passion of devotion that “all the people wept with her.” 
Her tears burst forth afresh at her first sight of blood- 
shed and of the corpses strewn over the battle-field. She 
erew frightened at her first wound, and only threw off 
the touch of womanly fear when she heard the signal 
for retreat. Yet more womanly was the purity with 
which she passed through the brutal warriors of a 
medizval camp, It was her care for her honor that led 
her to clothe herself in a soldier’s dress. She wept hot 
tears when told of the foul taunts of the English, and 
called passionately on God to witness her chastity. 
“Yield thee, yield thee, Glasdale,’ she cried to the 
English warrior whose insults had been foulest as he 
fell wounded at her feet, “you called me harlot! I 
have great pity on your soul.” But all thought of her- 
self was lost in the thought of her mission. It was in 
vain that the French generals strove to remain on the 
Loire. Jeanne was resolute to complete her task, and 
while the English remained panic-stricken around Paris 
she brought Charles to march upon Rheims, the old 
crowning-place of the Kings of France. Troyes and 
Chalons submitted as she reached them, Rheims ‘drove 
out the English garrison and threw open her gates to 
the king. 


524 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


With his coronation the Maid felt her errand to be 
over. ‘“O gentle King, the pleasure of God is done,” 
she cried, as she flung herself at the feet of Charles and 
asked leave to go home. ‘* Would it were His good 
will,” she pleaded with the Archbishop as he forced her 
to remain, “ that I might go and keep sheep once more 
with my sisters and my brothers: they would be so glad 
to see me again!” But the policy of the French Court 
detained her while the cities of the North of France 
opened their gates to the newly-consecrated King. Bed- 
ford however, who had been left without money or men, 
had now received reinforcements. Excluded as Cardinal 
Beaufort had been from the Council by Gloucester’s 
intrigues, he poured his wealth without stint into the 
exhausted treasury till his loans to the Crown reached 
the sum of half-a-million; and at this crisis he unsecru- 
pulously diverted an army which he had levied at his own 
cost for a crusade against the Hussites in Bohemia to 
his nephew’s aid. ‘The tide of success turned again. 
Charles, after a repulse before the walls of Paris, fell 
back behind the Loire; while the towns on the Oise 
submitted anew to the Duke of Burgundy, whose more 
active aid Bedford had bought by the cession of Cham- 
pagne. In the struggle against Duke Philip Jeanne 
fought with her usual bravery but with the fatal con- 
sciousness that her mission was at an end, and during 
the defence of Compiégne in the May of 14380 she fell 
into the power of the Bastard of Vendéme, to be sold 
by her captor into the hands of the Duke of Burgundy 
and by the Duke into the hands of the English. To the 
English her triumphs were victories of sorcery, and after 
a year’s imprisonment she was brought to trial on a 
charge of heresy before an ecclesiastical court with the 
Bishop of Beauvais at its head. 

Throughout the long process which followed every art 
was used to entangle her in her talk. But the simple 
shrewdness of the peasant girl foiled the efforts of her 
judges. “Do you believe,” they asked, “that you are 
in a state of grace?” “If Iam not,” she replied, “God 
will put me in it. If I am, God will keep me in it.” 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461, 525 


Her capture, they argued, showed that God had forsaken 
her. ‘Since it has pleased God that I should be taken,” 
she answered meekly, “it is for the best.” ‘“ Will you 
submit,” they demanded at last, “to the judgment of 
the Church Militant?” “I have come to the King of 
France,” Jeanne replied, “by commission from God and 
from the Church Triumphant above: to that Church I 
submit.” ‘Thad far rather die,” she ended passionately, 
“than renounce what I have done by my Lord’s com- 
mand.” They deprived her of mass. “Our Lord can © 
make me hear it without your aid,” she said, weeping. 
“Do your voices,” asked the judges, “forbid you to 
submit to the Church and the Pope?” “Ah, no! our 
Lord first served.” Sick, and deprived of all religious 
aid, it was no wonder that as the long trial dragged on 
and question followed question Jeanne’s firmness wavered. 
On the charge of sorcery and diabolical possession she 
she still appealed firmly toGod. “I hold to my Judge,” 
she said, as her earthly judges gave sentence against her, 
“to the King of Heaven and Earth. God has always 
been my Lord in all that [have done. The devil has 
never had power over me.” It was only with a view to 
be delivered from the military prison and transferred to 
the prisons of the Church that she consented to a formal 
abjuration of heresy. She feared in fact among the 
soldiery those outrages to her honor, to guard against 
which she had from the first assumed the dress of a man. 
In the eyes of the Church her dress was a crime and 
she abandoned it; but a renewed affront forced her to 
resume the one safeguard left her, and the return to it 
was treated as a relapse into heresy which doomed her to 
death. At the close of May, 1431, a great pile was raised 
in the market-place of Rouen where her statue stands ~ 
now. Even the brutal soldiers who snatched the hated 
“‘witch” from the hands of the clergy and hurried her to 
her doom were hushed as she reached the stake. One 
indeed passed to her a rough cross he had made from a 
stick he held, and she clasped it to her bosom.: “As her 
eyes ranged over the city from the lofty scaffold she was 
heard to murmur, “Oh Rouen, Rouen, I have great fear 


526 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 


lest you suffer from my death.” “ Yes! my voices were 
of God!” she suddenly cried as the last moment came ; 


“they have never deceived me!” Soon the flames | 


reached her, the girl’s head sank on her breast, there was 
one ery of “ Jesus! ”’—** We are lost,” an English soldier 
muttered as the crowd broke up; “we have burned a 
Saint.” 

The English cause was indeed irretrievably lost. In 
spite of a pompous coronation of the boy-king Henry at 
Paris at the close of 1431, Bedford with the cool wisdom 
of his temper seems to have abandoned from this time all 
hope of permanently retaining France and to have fallen 
back on his brother’s original plan of securing Normandy. 
Henry’s Court was established for a year at Rouen, a uni- 
versity founded at Caen, and whatever rapine and disorder 
might be permitted elsewhere, justice, good government, 
and security for trade were steadily maintained through 
the favored provinces. At home Bedford was resolutely 
backed by Cardinal Beaufort, whose services to the state 
as well as his real powers had at last succeeded in out- 
weighing Duke Humphrey’s opposition and in restoring 
him to the head of the royal Council. Beaufort’s diplo- 
matic ability was seen in the truces he wrung from Scot- 
land, and in his personal efforts to prevent the impending 
reconciliation of the Duke of Burgundy with the French 
King. But the death of the duke’s sister, who was the 
wife of Bedford, severed the last Jink which bound Philip 
to the English cause. He pressed for peace: and confer- 
ences for this purpose were held at Arras in 1435. Their 
failure only served him as a pretext for concluding a 
formal treaty with Charles; and his desertion was fol- 
lowed by a yet more fatal blow to the English cause in 
the death of Bedford. The loss of the Regent was the 
signal for the loss of Paris. In the spring of 1436 the 
city rose suddenly against its English garrison and de- 
clared for King Charles. Henry’s dominion shrank at 
once to Normandy and the outlying fortresses of Picardy 
and Maine. But reduced as they were to a mere handful, 
and fronted by a whole nation in arms, the English soldiers 
struggled on with as desperate a bravery as in their days 


— 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 527 


of triumph. Lord Talbot, the most daring of their leaders, 
forded the Somme with the water up to his chin to relieve 
Crotoy, and threw his men across the Oise in the face of 
a French army to relieve Pontoise. 

Bedford found for the moment an able and vigorous 
successor in the Duke of York. Richard of York was 
the son of the Earl of Cambridge who had been beheaded 
by Henry the Fifth; his mother was Anne, the heiress of 
the Mortimers and of their claim to the English crown 
as representatives of the third son of Udward the Third, 
Lionel of Clarence. It was to assert this claim on his 
son’s behalf that theEarl embarked in the fatal plot which 
cost him his head. But his death left Richard a mere boy 
in the wardship of the Crown, and for years to come all 
danger from his pretensions were at an end. Nor did the 
young Duke give any sign of a desire to assert them as 
he grew to manhood. He appeared content with a lineage 
and wealth which placed him at the head of the English 
baronage ; for he had inherited from his uncle the Duke- 
dom of York, his wide pcssessions cmbraced the estates 
of the families which united in him, the house of York, of 
Clarence, and of Mortimer, and his double descent from | 
Edward the Third, if it did no more, set him near to the 
Crown. The nobles looked up to him as the head of their 
order, and his political position recalled that of the Lan- 
eastrian Earls at an earlier time. But the position of 
Richard was as yet that of a faithful servant of the 
Crown ; and as Regent of France he displayed the abili- 
ties both of a statesman and of a general. During the 
brief space of his regency the tide of ill fortune was 
stemmed; and towns and castles were recovered along 
the border. 

His recall after a twelvemonth’s success is the first in- 
dication of the jealousy which the ruling house felt of 
triumphs gained by one who might some day assert his 
claim to the throne. Two years later, in 1440, the Duke 
was restored to his post, but it was now too late to do 
more than stand on the defensive, and all York’s ability 
was required to preserve Normandy and Maine. Men 
and money alike came scantily from England—where the 


528 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PHOPLE. 


Duke of Gloucester, freed from the check which Bedford 
had laid on him while he lived, was again stirring against 
Beaufort and the Council. But his influence had been 
weakened by a marriage with his mistress, Eleanor Cob- 
ham, and in 1441 it was all but destroyed by an incident 
which paints-the temper of the time. ‘The restless love 
of knowledge which was the one redeeming feature in 
Duke Humphrey’s character drew to him not only schol- 
ars but a horde of the astrologers and claimants of magical 
powers who were the natural product of an age in which 
the faith of the Middle Ages was dying out before the 
double attack of skepticism and heresy. Amongst these 
was a priest named Roger Bolinbroke. Bolinbroke was 
seized on a charge of compassing the King’s death by 
sorcery ; and the sudden flight of Eleanor Cobham to the 
sanctuary at Westminster was soon explained by a like 
accusation. Her judges found that she had made a waxen 
image of the King and slowly melted it at a fire, a process 
which was held to account for Henry’s growing weakness 
both of body and mind. The Duchess was doomed to 
penance for her crime; she was led bareheaded and bare- 
_ footed in a white penance-sheet through the streets of 

London, and then thrown into prison for life. Humphrey 
never rallied from the blow. But his retirement from 
public affairs was soon followed by that of his rival, Car- 
dinal Beaufort. Age forced Beaufort to withdraw to 
Winchester; and the Council was from that time swayed 
mainly by the Earl of Suffolk, William de la Pole, a grand- 
son of the minister of Richard the Second. 

Few houses had served the Crown more faithfully than 
that of De la Pole. His father fell at the siege of Har- 
fleur; his brother had been slain at Agincourt; William 
himself had served and been. taken prisoner in the war 
with France. But as a statesman he was powerless in 
the hands of the Beauforts, and from this moment the 
policy of the Beauferts drew England nearer and nearer 
to the chaos of civil war. John Beaufort, Duke of Som- 
erset, and his brother, Edmund, Earl of Dorset, were now 
the representatives of this house. They were grandsons 
of John of Gaunt by his mistress, Catharine Swynford. 


_ 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 529 


In later days Catharine became John’s wife, and his 
uncle’s influence over Richard at the close of that King’s 
reign was shown in a royal ordinance which legitimated 
those of his children by her who had been born before 
marriage. The ordinance was confirmed by an Act of 
Parliament, which as it passed the Houses was expressed 
in the widest and most general terms; but before issuing 
this as a statute Henry the Fourth inserted provisions 
which left the Beauforts illegitimate in blood so far as 
regarded the inheritance of the crown. Such royal alter- 
ations of statutes however had been illegal since the time 
of Edward the Third; and the Beauforts never recognized 
the force of this provision. But whether they Stood in 
the line of succession or no, the favor which was shown 
them alike by Henry the Fifth and his son drew them 
close to the throne, and the weakness of Henry the Sixth 
left them at this moment the mainstay of the House of 
Lancaster. Edmund Beaufort had taken an active part 
in the French wars, and had distinguished himself by the 
capture of Harfleur and the relief of Calais. But he was 
hated for his pride and avarice, and the popular hate grew 
as he showed his jealousy of the Duke of York. Loyal 
indeed as Richard had proved himself as yet, the preten- 
sions of his house were the most formidable danger which 
fronted the throne ; and with a weak and imbecile King 
we can hardly wonder that the Beauforts deemed it mad- 
ness to leave in the Duke’s hands the wide power of a 
Regent in France and the command of the armies across 
the sea. In 1444 York was recalled, and his post was 
taken by Edmund Beaufort himself. 

But the claim which York drew from the house of 
Mortimer was not his only claim to the crown; as the 
descendant of Edward the Third’s fifth son the crown 
would naturally devolve upon him on the extinction of 
the House of Lancaster, and of the direct line of that 
house Henry the Sixth was the one survivor. It was to 
check these hopes by continuing the Lancastrian succes- 
sion that Suffolk in 1445 brought about the marriage of 
the young King with Margaret, the daughter of Duke 
René of Anjou. But the marriage had another end. 

34 


530 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


The English ministers were anxious for the close of the 
war; and in the kinship between Margaret and King 
Charles of France they saw a chance of bringing it about. 
A truce was concluded as a prelude to a future peace, 
and the marriage treaty paved the way for it by ceding 
not only Anjou, of which England possessed nothing, but 
Maine, the bulwark of Normandy, to Duke René. For 
his part in this negotiation Suffolk was raised to the rank 
of marquis ; but the terms of the treaty and the delays 
which still averted a final peace gave new strength to 
the war-party with Gloucester at its head, and troubles 
were looked for in the Parliament which met at the open- 
ing of 1447. The danger was roughly met. Gloucester 
was arrested as he rode to Parliament on a charge of 
secret conspiracy ; and a few days later he was found 
dead in his lodging. Suspicions of murder were added 
to the hatred against Suffolk ; and his voluntary submis- 
sion to an inquiry by the Council into his conduct in the 
marriage treaty, which was followed by his acquittal of 
all blame, did little to counteract this. What was yet 
more fatal to Suffolk was the renewal of the war. In the 
face of the agitation against it the English ministers had 
never dared to execute the provisions of the marriage- 
treaty; and in 1448 Charles the Seventh sent an army to 
enforce the cession of Le Mans. Its surrender averted 
the struggle for a moment. But in the spring of 1449 a 
body of English soldiers from Normandy, mutinous at 
their want of pay, crossed the border and sacked the rich 
town of Fougeres in Brittany. Edmund Beaufort, who 
had now succeeded to the dukedom of Somerset, protested 
his innocence of this breach of truce, but he either could 
not or would not make restitution, and the war was re- 
newed. From this moment it was a mere series of French 
successes. In two months half Normandy was in the 
hands of Dunois ; Rouen rose against her feeble garrison 
and threw open her gates to Charles; and the defeat at 
Fourmigny of an English force which was sent to Somer- 
set’s aid was a signal for revolt throughout the rest of 
the provinces. The surrender of Cherbourg in August, 
1450, left Henry not a foot of Norman ground. 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. #581 


The loss of Normandy was generally laid to the charge 
of Somerset. He was charged with a miserly hoarding 
of supplies as well as planning in conjunction with Sutl- 
folk the fatal sack of Fougeres. His incapacity as a 
general added to the resentment at his recall of the 
Duke of York, a recall which had been marked as a dis- 
grace by the despatch of Richard into an honorable ban- 
ishment as lieutenant of Ireland. But it was this very 
recall which proved the most helpful to York. Had he 
remained in France he could hardly have averted the 
loss of Normandy, though he might have delayed it. 
As it was the shame of its loss fell upon Somerset, while 
the general hatred of the Beauforts and the growing con- 
tempt of the King whom they ruled expressed itself in 
a sudden rush of popular favor towards the man whom 
his disgrace had marked out as the object of their ill-will. 
From this moment the hopes of a better and a stronger 
government centred themselves in the Duke of York. 
The news of the French successes was at once followed 
by an outbreak of national wrath. Political ballads de- 
nounced Suffolk as the ape with his clog that had tied 
Talbot, the good “dog’’ who was longing to grip the 
Frenchmen. When the Bishop of Chichester, who had 
been sent to pay the sailors at Portsmouth, strove to put 
off the men with less than their due, they fell on him 
and slew him. Suffolk was impeached, and only saved 
from condemnation by submitting himself to the King’s 
mercy. He was sent into exile, but as he crossed the 
sea he was intercepted by a ship of Kentishmen, be- 
headed, and his body thrown on the sands at Dover. 

Kent was the centre of the national resentment. It 
was the great manufacturing district of the day, seeth- 
ing with a busy population, and especially concerned 
with the French contest through the piracy of the Cinque 
Ports. Every house along its coast showed some 
spoil from the wars. Here more than anywhere the loss 
of the great province whose cliffs could be seen from its 
shores was felt as a crowning disgrace, and as we shall 
see from the after complaints of its insuf%ents political 
wrongs added their fire to the national shame. Justice 


532 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


was ill administered; taxation was unequal and extor- 
tionate. Redress for such evils would now naturally have 
been sought from Parliament; but the weakness of the 
Crown gave the great nobles power to rob the freeholders 
of their franchise and return the knights of the shire. 
Nor could redress be looked for from the Court. The 
murder of Suffolk was the act of Kentishmen, and Suf- 
folk’s friends still held control over the royal councils. 
The one hope of reform lay in arms; and in the summer 
of 1450, while the last of the Norman fortresses were 
throwing open their gates, the discontent broke into open 
revolt. The rising spread from Kent over Surrey and 
Sussex. Everywhere it was general and organized—a 
military levy of the yeomen of the three shires. The 
parishes sent their due contingent of armed men; we 
know that in many hundreds the constables formally 
summoned their legal force te war. ‘The insurgents were 
joined by more than a hundred esquires and gentlemen ; 
and two great landholders of Sussex, the Abbot of Battle 
and the Prior of Lewes, openly favored their cause. 
John Cade, a soldier of some experience in the French 
wars, took at this crisis the significant name of Mortimer, 
and placed himself at theirhead. The army, now twenty 
thousand men strong, marched in the beginning of June 
on Blackheath. On the advance of the King with an 
equal force, however, they determined to lay their com- 
plaint before the royal Council and withdraw to their 
homes. The “Complaint of the Commons of Kent,” is 
of high value in the light which it throws on the condi- 
tion of the people. Not one of the demands touches on 
religious reform. The question of villeinage and serfage 
finds no place in it. In the seventy years which had in- 
tervened since the last peasant rising, villeinage had died 
naturally away before the progress of social change. The 
Statutes of Apparel, which from this time encumber the 
Statute-book, show in their anxiety to curtail the dress 
of the laborer and the farmer the progress of these classes 
in comfort and wealth; and from the language of the 
statutes themstlves it is plain that as wages rose both 
farmer and laborer went on clothing themselves better 


: 
‘ 
’ 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. yates 


in spite of sumptuary provisions. With the exception of 
a demand for the repeal of the Statute of Laborers, the 
programme of the Commons was not social but political. 
The *“ Complaint” calls for administrative and economi- 
cal reforms; it denounces the exclusion of the Duke of 
York and other nobles from the royal councils; it calls 
for a change of ministry: a more careful expenditure of 
the royal revenue, and for the restoration of freedom of 
election which had been broken in upon by the interfer- | 
ence both of the Crown and the great landowners. 

The Council refused to receive the “ Complaint,” and 
a body of troops under Sir Humphrey Stafford fell on the 
Kentishmen as they reached Sevenoaks. This attack, how- 
ever, was roughly beaten off, and Cade’s host turned back 
to encounter the royal army. But the royal army itself 
was already calling for justice on the traitors who misled 
the King; and at the approach of the Kentishmen it broke 
up in disorder. Its dispersion was followed by Henry’s 
flight to Kenilworth and the entry of the Kentishmen 
into London, where the execution of Lord Say, the most 
unpopular of the royal ministers, broke the obstinacy of 
his colleagues. For three days the peasants entered the 
city freely, retiring at nightfall to their camp across the 
river: but on the fifth of July the men of London, goaded 
by the outrages of the rabble whom their presence roused 
to plunder, closed the bridge against them, and beat back 
an attack with great slaughter. The Kentishmen still, 
however, lay unbroken in Southwark, while Bishop Wayn- 
flete conferred with Cade on behalf of the Council. Their 
“ Complaint” was received, pardons were granted to all 
who had joined in the rising, and the insurgents dis- 
persed quietly to their homes. Cade had striven in vain 
to retain them in arms; on their dispersion he formed 
a new force by throwing open the gaols, and carried off 
the booty he had won to Rochester. Here, however, his 
men quarrelled over the plunder; his force broke up, and 
Cade himself was slain by Iden, the Sheriff of Kent, as he 
fled into Sussex. 

Kent remained restless through the year, and arising in 
Wiltshire showed the growing and wide-spread trouble of 


534 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the time. The “Complaint” indeed had only been re- 
ceived to be laid aside. No attempt was made to redress 
the grievances which it stated or to reform the govern- 
ment. On the contrary, the main object of popular hate, 
the Duke of Somerset, was at once recalled from Normandy 
to take his place at the head of the royal Council. York, 


on the other hand, whose recall had been pressed in the © 


“Complaint,” was looked upon as an open foe. “Strange 
language,” indeed, had long before the Kentish rising been 
uttered about the Duke. Men had threatened that he 
“ should be fetched with many thousands,” and the expec- 
tation of his coming to reform the government became so 
general that orders were given to close the western ports 
against his landing. If we believe the Duke himself, he 
was forced to move at last by efforts to indict him as a 
traitor in Ireland itself. Crossing at Michaelmas to Wales 
in spite of the efforts to arrest him, he gathered four 
thousand men on his estates and marched upon’ London. 
No serious effort was made to prevent his approach to the 
King; and Henry found himself helpless to resist his 
demand of a Parliament and of the admission of new 
councillors to the royal council-board. Parliament met in 
November, and a bitter strife between York and Somerset 
ended in the arrest of the latter. A demand which at 
once followed shows the importance of his fall. Henry 
the Sixth still remained childless; and Young, a member 
for Bristol, proposed in the Commons that the Duke of 
York should be declared heir tothethrone. But the blow 
was averted by repeated prorogations, and Henry’s sym- 
pathies were shown by the committal of Young to the 
Tower, by the release of Somerset, and by his promotion 
to the captaincy of Calais, the most important military 
post under the Crown. The Commons indeed still re- 
mained resolute. When they again met in the summer of 
1451 they called for the removal of Somerset and his crea- 
tures from the King’s presence. But Henry evaded the 
demand ; and the dissolution of the House announced the 
royal resolve to govern in defiance of the national will. 
The contest between the House and the Crown had 
cost England her last possessions across the Channel. As 


: 
: 


THE PARLIAMENT, 13807—1461. 535 


York marched upon London Charles closed on the frag- 
ment of the duchy of Guienne which still remained to the 
descendants of Eleanor. In afew months all was won. 
Bourg and Blaye surrendered in the spring of 1451, 
Bordeaux in the summer; two months later the loss of 
Bayonne ended the war in the south. Ofall the English 
possessions in France only Calais remained; and in 1452 
Calais was threatened with attack. The news of this 
crowning danger again called York to the front. On the 
declaration of Henry’s will to resist all change in the 
government the Duke had retired to his castle of Ludlow, 
arresting the whispers of his enemies with a solemn pro- 
test that he was true lhegeman to the King. But after 
events show that he was planning a more decisive course 
of action than that which had broken down with the disso- 
lution of the Parliament, and the news of the approaching 
siege gave ground for taking such a course at once. 
Semerset had been appointed Captain of Calais, and as 
his incapacity had lost England Normandy, it would cost 
her—so England believed—her last fortress in France. 
It was said indeed that the Duke was negotiating with 
Burgundy forits surrender. In the spring of 1452, there- 
fore, York again marched on London, but this time with a 
large body of ordnance and an army which the arrival cf 
reinforcements under Lord Cobham and the Earl of 
Devonshire raised to over twenty thousand men. Elud- 
ing the host which gathered round the King and Somerset 
he passed by the capital, whose gates had been closed by 
Henry’s orders, and entering Kent took post at Dartford. 
His army was soon fronted by the superior force of the 
King, but the interposition of the more moderate lords of 
the Council averted open conflict. Henry promised that 
Somerset should be put on his trial on the charges 
advanced by the Duke, and York on this pledge disbanded 
his men. But the pledge was at once broken, Somerset 
remained in power. York found himself practically a 
prisoner, and only won his release by an oath to refrain 
from further ‘ routs” or assemblies. 

‘T'wo such decisive failures seemed for the time to have 
utterly broken Richard’s power. Weakened as the crown 


536 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


had been by losses abroad, it was clearly strong enough 
as yet to hold its own against the chief of the baronage. 
A general amnesty indeed sheltered York’s adherents 
and enabled the Duke himself to retire safely to Ludlow, 
but for more than a year his rival Somerset wielded 
without opposition the power Richard had striven to 
wrest from him. <A favorable turn in the progress of the 
war gave fresh vigor to the Government. The French 
forces were abruptly called from their march against Calais 
to the recovery of the south. The towns of Guienne had 
opened their gates to Charles on his pledge to respect their 
franchises, but the need of the French treasury was too 
great to respect the royal word, and heavy taxation turned 
the hopes of Gascony to its old masters. On the landing 
of an English force under Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, a 
general revolt restored to the English their possessions 
on the Garonne. Somerset used this break of better for- 
tune to obtain heavy subsidies from Parliament in 1463 , 
but ere the twenty thousand men whose levy was voted 
could cross the Channel a terrible blow had again ruined 
the English cause. Ina march to relieve Castillon on the 
Dordogne, Shrewsbury suddenly found himself face to face 
with the whole French army. His men were mown down 
by its guns, and the Earl himself left dead on the field. 
His fall was the signal for a general submission. Town 
after town again threw open its gates to Charles, and 
Bordeaux capitulated in October. 

The final loss of Gascony fell upon England at a moment 
when two events at home changed the whole face of 
affairs. After eight years of childlessness the King 
became in October the father of a son. With the birth 
of this boy the rivalry of York and the Beauforts for the 
right of succession ceased to be the mainspring of English 
politics; and the crown seemed again to rise out of the 
turmoil of warring factions. But with the birth of the 
son came the madness of the father. Henry the Sixth 
sank into a state of idiotey which made his rule impos- 
sible, and his ministers were forced to call a great council 
of peers to devise means for the government of the realm. 
York took his seat at this council, and the mood of the 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. bol 


nobles was seen in the charges of misgovernment which 
were at once made against Somerset and in his committal 
to the Tower. But Somerset was no longer at the head 
of the royal party. With the birth of her son the Queen, | 
Margaret of Anjou, came to the front. Her restless 
despotic temper was quickened to action by the dangers 
which she saw threatening her boy’s heritage of the 
erown; and the demand to be invested with the full royal 
power which she made after a vain effort to rouse her 
husband from his lethargy aimed directly at the exclusion ~ 
of the Duke of York. The demand however was roughly - 
set aside ; the Lords gave permission to York to summon 
a Parliament as the King’s lieutenant ; and on the assembly 
of the Houses in the spring of 1454, as the mental aliena- 
tion of the King continued, the Lords chose Richard Pro- 
tector of the Realm. With Somerset in prison little 
opposition could be made to the Protectorate, and that 
little was soon put down. But the nation had hardly 
time to feel the guidance of Richard’s steady hand when 
it was removed. At the opening of 1455 the King 
recovered his senses, and York’s Protectorate came at 
once to an end. 

Henry had no sooner grasped power again than he fell 
back on his old policy. The Queen became his chief ad- 
viser. The Duke of Somerset was released from the tower 
and owned by Henry in formal court as his true and faith- 
ful liegeman. York, on the other hand, was deprived of 
the government of Calais, and summoned with his friends 
to a council at Leicester, whose object was to provide for 
the surety of the king’s person. Prominent among these 
friends were two Earls of the house of Neville. We have 
seen how great a part the Nevilles played after the accession 
of the house of Lancaster; it was mainly to their efforts 
that Henry the Fourth owed the overthrow of the Percies, 
their rivals in the mastery of the norths and from that 
moment their wealth and power had been steadily growing. 
Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, was one of the mighti- 
est barons of the realm ; but his power wasall but equalled 
by that of his son, a second Richard, who had won the 
Earldom of Warwick by his marriage with the heiress of 


588 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


the Beauchamps. The marriage of York to Salisbury’s 
sister, Cecily Neville, had bound both the earls to his 
cause, and under his Protectorate Salisbury had been 
created Chancellor. But he was stripped of this office on 
the Duke’s fall ;-and their summons to the council of 
Leicester was held by the Nevilles to threaten ruin to 
themselves as to York. The three nobles at once took 
arms to secure, as they alleged, safe access to the King’s 
person. Henry at the news of their approach mustered 
two thousand men, and with Somerset, the Earl of North- 
umberland, and other nobles in his train, advanced to 
St. Albans. 

On the 23d of May York and the two Earls encamped 
without the town, and called on Henry “ to deliver such 
as we will accuse, and they to have like as they have 
deserved and done.’ The King’s reply was as bold as 
the demand. ‘“ Rather than they shall have any lord 
here with me at this time,” he replied, “ I shall this day 
for their sake and in this quarrel myself live and die.” 
A summons to disperse as traitors left York and his fellow 
nobles no hope but in an attack. At eventide three 
assaults were made on the town. Warwick was the first 
to break in, and the sound of his trumpets in the streets 
turned the fight into a rout. Death had answered the 
prayer which Henry rejected, for the Duke of Somerset 
with Lord Clifford and the Earl of Northumberland were 
among the fallen. The King himself fell into the victor’s 
hands. The three lords kneeling before him prayed him 
to take them for his true liegemen, and then rode by his side 
in triumph into London, where a parliament was at once 
summoned which confirmed the acts of the Duke; and 
on a return of the King’s malady again nominated York 
as Protector. Butin thespring of 1456 Henry’s recovery 
again ended the Duke’s rule; and for two years the war- 
ring parties sullenly watched one another. A temporary 
reconciliation between them was brought about by the 
misery of the realm, but an attempt of the Queen to arrest 
the Nevilles in 1458 caused a- fresh outbreak of war. 
Salisbury defeated Lord Audley in a fight at Bloreheath, 
in Staffordshire, and York with the two Earls raised his 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. 589 


standard at Ludlow. But the crown was still stronger 
than any force of the baronage. The King marched 
rapidly on the insurgents, and a decisive battle was only 
averted by the desertion of a part of the Yorkist army 
and th edisbanding of the rest. The Duke himself fled 
to Ireland, the Earls to Calais, while the Queen, summon: 
ing a Parliament at Coventry in November, pressed on 
their attainder. But the check, whatever its cause, had 
been merely a temporary one. York and Warwick planned 
a fresh attempt from their secure retreats in Ireland and 
Calais ; and in the midsummer of 1460 the Earls of Salis- 
bury and Warwick, with Richard’s son Edward, the 
young Earl of March, again landed in Kent. Backed by 
a general rising of the country they entered London 
amidst the acclamations of its citizens. The royal army 
was defeated in a hard-fought action at Northampton in 
July. Margaret fled to Scotland, and Henry was left a 
prisoner in the hands of the Duke of York. 

The position of York as heir presumptive to the crown 
by his descent from Edmund of Langley had ceased with 
the birth of a son to Henry the Sixth: but the victory of 
Northampton no sooner raised him to the supreme con- 
trol of affairs than he ventured to assert the far more dan- 
gerous claims which he had secretly cherished as the rep- 
resentative of Lionel of Clarence, and to their conscious- 
ness of which was owing the hostility of Henry and his 
Queen. Such a claim was in direct opposition to that 
power of the two Houses whose growth had been the 
work of the past hundred years. There was no constitu- 
tional ground for any limitation of the right of Parhament 
to set aside an elder branch in favor of a younger, and in 
the Parliamentary Act which placed the House of Lan- 
caster on the throne the claim of the House of Mortimer 
had been deliberately set aside. Possession, too, told 
against the Yorkist pretensions. To modern minds the 
best reply to Richard’s claim lay in the words used ata later 
time by Henry himself. ‘ My father was King; his father 
also was King: I myself have worn the crown for ty years 
from my cradle ; you have all sworn fealty to me as your 
sovereign, and your fathers have done the like to mine. 


540 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


How then can my right b> disputed?” Long and undis- 
turbed possession as Well as a distinctly legal title by free 
vote of Parliament was in favor or the House of Lancaster. 
But the persecution of the Lollards, the interference with 
elections, the odium of the war, the shame of the long 
misgovernment, told fatally against the weak and imbecile 
King whose reign had been a long battle of contending 
factions. That the misrule had been serious was shown by 
the attitude of the commercial class. It was the rising of 
Kent, the great manufacturing district of the realm, which 
brought about the victory of Northampton. Through- 
out the struggle which followed London and the great 
merchant towns were steady for the House of York. 
Zeal for the Lancastrian cause was found only in Wales, 
in northern England, and in the south-western shires. 
{t is absurd to suppose that the shrewd traders of Cheap- 
side wer moved by an abstract question of hereditary 
right, or that the wild Welshmen believed themselves to 
be supporting the right of Parliament to regulate the 
succession. But it marks the power which Parliament 
had gained that, directly as his claims ran in the teeth of 
a succession established by it, the Duke of York felt him- 
self compelled to convene the two Housesin October, and 
to lay his claim before the Lords as a petition of right. 
Neither oaths nor the nuinerous Acts which had settled 
and confirmed the right to the crown in the House of 
Lancaster could destroy, he pleaded, his hereditary claim. 
The bulk of the Lords refrained from attendance, and those 
who were present received the petition with hardly con- 
cealed reluctance. They solved the question, as they 
hoped, by a compromise. They refused to dethrone the 
King, but they had sworn no fealty to-his child, and at 
Henry’s death they agreed to receive the Duke as suc- 
cessor to the crown. 

But the open display of York’s pretensions at once 
united the partisans of the royal House in a vigorous 
resistance ; and the deadly struggle which received the 
name of the Wars of the Roses from the white rose which 
formed the badge of the House of York and the red rose 
which was the cognizance of the House of Lancaster be- 


THE PARLIAMENT. 1307—1461. bbl 


gan in agathering of the North round Lord Clifford and 
of the West round Henry, Duke of Somerset, the son of 
the Duke who had fallen at St. Albans. York, who 
hurried in December to meet the first with a far inferior 
force, was defeated and slain at Wakefield. The passion 
of civil war broke fiercely out on the field. The Earl ot 
Salisbury who had been taken prisoner was hurried to 
the block. .The head of Duke Richard, crowned in 
mockery with adiadem of paper, is said to have been im- 
paled on the walls of York. His second son, Lord Rut- 
land, fell crying for mercy on his knees before Clifford. 
But Clifford’s father had been the first to fall in the bat- 
tle of St Albans which opened the struggle. “As your 
father killed mine,” cried the savage Baron, while he 
plunged his dagger in the young noble’s breast, “ I will 
kill you! ” The brutal deed was soon to |e avenged. 
Richard’s eldest son, Edward, the Earl of March, was 
busy gathering a force on the Welsh border in support of 
his father at the moment when the Duke was defeated 
and slain. Young as he was Edward showed in this hour 
of apparent ruin the quickness and vigor of his temper, 
and routing on his march a body of Lancastrians at Mor- 
timer’s Cross struck boldly upon London. It was on 
London that the Lancastrian army had moved after its 
victory at Wakefield. A desperate struggle took place 
at St. Albans where a force of Kentish men with the 
Earl of Warwick strove to bar its march on the capital, 
but Warwick’s force broke under cover of night and an 
immediate advance of the conquerors might have decided 
the contest. Margaret however paused to sully her vic- 
tory by aseries of bloody executions, and the rough 
northerners who formed the bulk of her army scattered 
to pillage while Edward, hurrying from the west, ap- 
peared before the capital. The citizens rallied at his 
call, and cries of ‘‘ Long live King Edward” rang round 
the handsome young leader as he rode through the streets. 
A council of Yorkist lords, hastily summoned, resolved 
that the compromise agreed on in Parliament was-at an 
end and that Henry of Lancaster had forfeited the throne. 
The final issue however now lay not with Parliament, 


542 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 


but with the sword. Disappointed of London, the Lan- 
castrian army fell rapidly back on the North, and Edward 
hurried as rapidly in pursuit. On the 29th of March, 
1461, the two armies encountered one another at Towton 
Field, near Tadcaster. In the numbers engaged, as. well 
as to the terrible obstinacy of the struggle, no such battle 
had been seen in England since the fight of Senlac. The 
two armies together numbered nearly 120,000 men. 
The day had just broken when the Yorkists advanced 
through a thick snowfall, and for six hours the battle 
raged with desperate bravery on either side. At one 
critical moment Warwick saw his men falter, and stabbing 
his horse before them, swore on the cross of his sword to 
win or die on the field. The battle was turned at last 


by the arrival of the Duke of Norfolk with a fresh force 


from the Eastern Counties, and at noon the Laneastrians 
gave way. A river in their rear turned the retreat into 
a rout, and the flight and carnage, for no quarter was 
given on either side, went on through the night and the 
morrow. Edward’s herald counted more than 20,000 
Lancastrian corpses on the field. The losses of the con- 
querors were hardly less heavy than those of the con- 
quered. But their triumph was complete. The Earl of 
Northumberland was slain; the Earls of Devonshire and 
Wiltshire were taken and beheaded; the Duke of Som- 
erset fled into exile. Henry himself with his Queen was 
forced to fly over the border and to find a refuge in 
Scotland. The cause of the House of Lancaster was 
lost ; and with the victory of Towton the crown of Eng- 
land passed to Edward of York. 


END OF VOL I. 


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